Darwin aims to provide a comprehensive set of free and open-source fonts de­sig­ned specifically for article and book writing, catering to the needs of academics and spe­cia­lists in diverse areas.

To date, there isn’t a single open-­source typeface coming with multiple optical sizes, having extensive language coverage and support for specialist usage in ma­the­ma­tics, phonetics, and medieval studies. The purpose of Darwin is to fill this gap.

To this end, Darwin must fulfill the following set of goals.

Darwin is licensed under the SIL Open Font License. This means in particular that it is free for anyone to use and will forever remain so.

Darwin has to cover a very wide range of languages, covering all languages using the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts listed in Hy­per­glot.

Darwin must come with a satisfactory number of optical sizes, going all the way from the smallest foot­notes (~5 pt), through body text (10~12 pt) and headlines (~24 pt), all the way to book covers (≥ 48 pt).

Darwin must have extensive coverage for linguistics usage, including the IPA, ame­ri­ca­nist phonetic notation, the extIPA, etc.

Darwin must have extensive coverage for medievalist usage as defined by the Me­die­val Unicode Font Ini­tia­tive.

Darwin must come with an extensive, high-quality family of math fonts of match­ing style, together with an accompanying LaTeX package.