Draft:Vollkorn (typeface)

Vollkorn is a serif typeface designed between the years 2005 and 2006 by the German Friedrich Althausen. It is a transitional typeface intended for body text and is rooted in the Dutch tradition of typeface design with a tall x-height and contrast between thick and thin letter strokes. Vollkorn is legible at multiple point sizes and has a slightly increased weight for better balance on the page. The name Vollkorn is a German word that translates to “whole meal” or the whole wheat flour made from the entire wheat grain. Althausen has stated on his website that the typeface’s usage is for everyday “bread and butter” use.

Vollkorn is a full typeface which encompasses twelve styles, OpenType features, the Cyrillic alphabet, the Greek alphabet, and a long list of other supported languages. The typeface comes with a full set of numerals including fractions, inferior, and superior. These numerals also include tabular and proportional versions. It was always intended for this typeface to serve multiple languages, and the accents, ligature pairs, and contextual alternative glyphs reflect this decision. Being a German designer, Althausen follows in the tradition of having a full set of arrows and mathematical symbols within the typeface. There are also mathematical Greek glyphs to compliment the Greek language. The full character set can be viewed on the Vollkorn website.

Releases
Vollkorn releases are in the OpenType (otf), TrueType (ttf), and variable font formats. OpenType features allow for stylistic alternatives such as small caps, historical letter forms, and case sensitive character forms to be encoded in the same font. The variable font format allows for the typeface to store an infinite number or stylistic and character variations within a single font file.

License
The Vollkorn typeface is licensed under the SIL Open Font License (or OFL in short) which is one of the premier open font licenses. The license allows for personal and commercial use in projects with which the typeface is featured. Most importantly, in modern ebook publishing, the typeface may be bundled freely within the ebook file provided the typeface is not sold exclusively on its own, and the SIL OFL license is also included.

Usage

 * L.A. Hall's A Man of Independent Mind features Vollkorn as the typeface for body text.
 * DW News uses Vollkorn for its online news headline typeface.