PolarSys B612 font family

B612 is an highly legible open source font family designed and tested to be used on aircraft cockpit screens.

Main characteristics are:

Maximize the distance between the forms of the characters
Respect the primitives of the different letters
Harmonize the forms and their spacing

Customizations

The Mono fonts were edited with FontLab to add dotted-zero and slashed-zero sources (vfc and ufo formats). Also the fonts had Ligatures and Nerd Fonts glyphs allowing use on terminals and editors.

Some options can be configured via Opentype features:

Contextual Alternates and Ligatures can be enabled or disabled with "'calt' on" / "'calt' off" or "editor.fontLigatures: true".
Slashed Zero can be enabled with "'zero' on"
Empty Zero can be enabled with "'ezer' on"

For example on VSCode, to have ligatures and contextual alternates enabled and keep using the dotted zero, set:

"editor.fontLigatures": true
// or
"editor.fontLigatures": "'calt' on,'zero' off, 'ezer' off",
// or to have context alts and slashed zero, set:
"editor.fontLigatures": "'calt' on,'zero' on",

The fonts were Ligaturized using https://github.com/ToxicFrog/Ligaturizer. The ligatures come from Fira Code font originally.

Nerd Fonts glyphs were added to the fonts using Docker container from https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/.

The modified fonts can be downloaded from ./fonts/otf directory.

Font Specimen

Below the font Specimen containing the standard alphabet, punctuation and symbols including the default enabled ligatures:

Below additional scripts, blocks and drawing elements:

Building or Updating the fonts

To build a new version of the font, edit it with FontLab, then run the "Export Font As" option, selecting "UFO Package" format and below the format, select all fonts to be exported. Than export again in the same menu but selecting "OpenType PS (.otf)" format to generate the output fonts in the fonts directory.

To add ligatures to the fonts, use Ligaturizer tool. First clone the repository and install the dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/ToxicFrog/Ligaturizer
cd Ligaturizer
git submodule update --init --recursive
# copy the fonts to be processed to the fonts directory
mkdir fonts/B612
cp /path/to/B612/fonts/otf/*.otf fonts/B612

Edit the Ligaturizer.py file to disable some ligatures if needed (like the <= and >= which looks wrong on some code). Then edit build.py to comment fonts which do not need edit and Also ligaturizer requires fontforge which can be installed with brew install fontforge.

Then run the following command:

make

To add the Nerd Fonts glyphs, go to the fonts directory, create an in directory and copy the fonts to be processed there. Then run the following command (requires Docker or Podman):

docker run -v $(pwd):/in -v $(pwd)/out:/out nerdfonts/patcher -c

The patched fonts will be available in the out directory. Move them to the fonts directory and delete the in and out directories.

The genesis of PolarSys B612

In 2010, Airbus initiated a research collaboration with ENAC and Université de Toulouse III on a prospective study to define and validate an “Aeronautical Font”: the challenge was to improve the display of information on the cockpit screens, in particular in terms of legibility and comfort of reading, and to optimize the overall homogeneity of the cockpit.

2 years later, Airbus came to find Intactile DESIGN to work on the design of the eight typographic variants of the font. This one, baptized B612 in reference to the imaginary asteroid of the aviator Saint‑Exupéry, benefited from a complete hinting on all the characters.

Releasing a new version of the font

Update the version number in the font info of the source files
Make a copy of the source files
Open the copies in Fontlab
Run the merge intersection command on each file
Generate the ttf files
Run the build script from the scripts folder to fix digital signature

Copyright

License

This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v2.0 and Eclipse Distribution License v1.0 and the SIL Open Font License v1.1 which accompanies this distribution. The Eclipse Public License is available at https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v20.html and the Eclipse Distribution License is available at https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/edl-v10.php. The SIL Open Font License v1.1 is available at https://scripts.sil.org/OFL

carlosedp / b612