Note: The Toga fonts still work fine, but they are obsolete. Please have a look at the DejaVu fonts, especially the "experimental" condensed variations, for a far more complete (with many international symbols not found in Toga) and up-to-date set of fonts also derived from Bistream Vera.

Toga! Toga!

Toga Sans™ is the result of an evening spent with the Bitstream Vera Sans™ font and the pfaedit program. Essentially, just as Microsoft's Tahoma™ was designed as a screen-width friendlier version of their Verdana™ (and Bitstream Vera Sans appears to have been strongly influenced by Verdana), Toga is meant to be a narrower version of Vera. In fact, that's what it literally is, because I ended up just using "scale" on all the characters and then adjusting the metrics accordingly. It looks better than the versions where I tried to manually adjust kern pairs and whatnot. Per the Bitstream Vera Sans license agreement, I have renamed the font and removed Bitstream's name despite the minimal amount of work I did, and this modified font is available under the same terms.

Update 2003-10-03: The new version is 0.20. The changes in this version include a 90% reduction in file size and hopefully improved compatibility with Windows XP, both due to removing some 65,000 empty glyphs. As you can see from the screenshot above, I also did a Toga Serif, similarly to how I did Toga Sans. Additionally, the RPM package is more in line with the other font packages available for Mandrake; I'd based it on a Red Hat spec file previously which was causing the fonts to work everywhere but OpenOffice.

I'm using Toga Sans as my default font now and it looks very nice, but I have no idea what I may have done to other encodings, special characters, non-antialiased usage, etc. I'm putting it out there because (a) I and many others have been wanting a font as pretty as Bitstream Vera Sans but narrower for screen use, and (b) I'm hoping a "real" font designer will get annoyed at this quick hack and do a real "Bitstream Vera Sans Condensed". :) The same goes for the serif font, but to a lesser extent. While the version is 0.20, I don't foresee any need for updates unless another problem is discovered or the original Vera fonts get a major update, so I guess this is sort of equivalent to a 1.0 release.

RPM: fonts-ttf-toga-0.20-1mdk.noarch.rpm
Source RPM: fonts-ttf-toga-0.20-1mdk.src.rpm
ZIP: ttf-toga-0.20.zip
PfaEdit source files: ttf-toga-pfaeditfiles-0.20.tar.gz

This page and modifications to the font are Copyright 2003 Rob Kudla/Binara Inc. See COPYRIGHT.TXT in distribution for terms of use or this page for more information about the font from which this was derived. Toga Sans is a trademark of Binara, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Binara, Inc. and Rob Kudla are not associated with Bitstream, Inc. and GNOME. Binara is not a recursive acronym.