Adobe has open sourced a new font family called Source Sans Pro. The font itself is now available in OTF and TTF formats. The company is also releasing the underlying source material so that the font can easily be modified and improved by third parties. Adobe is releasing the fonts under the terms of the SIL Open Font License, an OSI-approved license that broadly allows modification and redistribution.

Source Sans Pro was created by Adobe typeface designer Paul D. Hunt. He announced the availability of the font today in an entry that was published on Adobe’s Typblography blog. In the blog entry, he explains that the design was partly inspired by the visual simplicity of the Gothic fonts created by influential designer Morris Fuller Benton in the early 20th century.

Adobe aims to use the new font in its open source software applications. Hunt’s blog entry says that a preliminary version is included as a user interface font in Brackets, an open source code editor for Web development that Adobe is building with HTML5 on top of WebKit. Feedback from early users encouraged further refinement, such as adding a little tail to the lowercase "l" to help better distinguish it from an uppercase "I" character.

In addition to making the fonts and source material available for download, Adobe is also making it available through font hosting services, including Typekit (which Adobe acquired last year), and Google Web Fonts. Hunt’s blog post says that further improvements are on the horizon. Support for Cyrillic and Greek are planned. Adobe is also working on a fixed-width version that would be suitable for use in a terminal environment or code editor.

Professional-quality fonts that can be freely redistributed under open terms are highly valued by the open source software community. Such fonts are often widely adopted and used in many projects. Some recent examples of open fonts that were designed by professional typeface designers include Google’s Roboto font and Canonical’s Ubuntu font.