KDE's Oxygen Font Progresses Towards Another Release

Kubuntu's cousin distribution, Ubuntu, has had it's own font family for a while now. In fact, if you're new to Linux or Kubuntu you may not even be aware that it's already installed on your Kubuntu machine. You can enable the Ubuntu font family at any time by opening System Settings > Application Appearance > Fonts and choosing the Ubuntu font appropriate for the different font types.

Another open source font project was announced less than a year ago aiming to help unify a consistent look between all aspects of the KDE Plasma Workspace. Having standardized on Oxygen as the default icon set, it became desirable to have a font that looked good and complimented Oxygen while giving an elegant and consistent visual experience. Enter the Oxygen true type font.  As the font's author  Vernon Adams states, the goal of Oxygen is

"to design a desktop/gui font for integrated use with the KDE desktop. The design is based on interpolations between ‘Muli’ and ‘FontOne’ that have been further shaped to reach a clear, legible font to use within the KDE gui.

The basic concept for ‘Oxygen Font’ was to design a clear, legible, sans serif, that would be rendered with Freetype on Linux-based devices. The idea was to not quite follow a ‘purist’ line of sans serif typeface formulae, but to allow some juxtapositioning of font forms to give familiarity but also a sense of newness. A version of the font is also under development that is aimed to be a branding typeface for the desktop".

Progress

The project is currently working towards a .3 release. If you live in the Western Hemisphere, Oxygen is already usable for you for general use. There is still work to do on the Cyrillic character set and continual general fit and polish, however it is said to be very close to ready for prime time.

Oxygen Font from version 1 within KDE

Another Pic of Oxygen TTF

Installing

Installation of Oxygen-font-regular is easy to do. Just head on over to KDE Playground and click on "Oxygen-Regular.ttf" as shown below.

Click the Oxygen-Regular.ttf hyperlink as shown

Once the link is selected, you will be prompted to open or save the file. Select "Save File". It should be the default, but if not select it.

For east installation, select "Save File"

Next, go to your Downloads folder, assuming you downloaded the font there. Click on the downloaded file to open the font within KFontView. To go ahead and install, click the install button in the lower right corner.

Oxygen font as viewed within KFontView

Click the "Install" button

You can then select whether the font is installed system-wide, or just for you as a user. That's it! Once the font is installed, it can be selected as explained above with the Ubuntu font. Now you have what will eventually be the "official" font of KDE Oxygen.