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
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.
Below the font Specimen containing the standard alphabet, punctuation and symbols including the default enabled ligatures:
Below additional scripts, blocks and drawing elements:
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.
- 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 (c) 2012, AIRBUS (airbus-group.com). All rights reserved.
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