PT Fonts

Public Type fonts

Category	Font superfamily
Classification	Humanist sans-serif Transitional serif Monospaced font
Designer(s)	Alexandra Korolkova with Olga Umpelova and Vladimir Yefimov
Commissioned by	Rospechat
Foundry	ParaType
Date created	2009
Date released	13 January 2010
License	SIL Open Font License or ParaType Free Font License

The Public Type or PT Fonts are a family of free/libre fonts released from 2009 onwards, comprising PT Sans, PT Serif and PT Mono. They were commissioned from the design agency ParaType by Rospechat, a department of the Russian Ministry of Communications, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Peter the Great's orthography reform and to create a font family that supported all the of Cyrillic script used by the minority languages of Russia, as well as the Latin alphabet.

Primarily designed by Alexandra Korolkova, the family includes sans-serif and serif designs, both with caption styles for small-print text, and a monospaced font for use in programming. They are available under the English-language SIL Open Font License; the original font, PT Sans, was also released under ParaType's own Free Font License. Additional styles, such as extended, condensed and extra-bold, are sold from ParaType as PT Sans Pro and PT Serif Pro.

The fonts include Latin and Cyrillic characters and covers almost all minority languages of the Russian Federation. The slashed-Р ruble symbol (before it became official in December 2013) is included at the U+20B9…U+20CF code points.

Regarding classification of design, to Western eyes PT Sans can be considered a humanist sans-serif font, with open letterforms and a true italic featuring calligraphic a and f glyphs. PT Serif can be considered a transitional serif font, with strongly vertical axes but limited variation of stroke width, and insistent, dagger-like serifs on lower-case letters. Its inclusion of optical sizes is extremely rare in libre fonts, EB Garamond being the only other widely used libre font with this feature.

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