B612 is an highly legible open source font family designed and tested to be used on aircraft cockpit screens.

Main characteristics are:

• Maximize the distance between the forms of the characters
• Respect the primitives of the different letters
• Harmonize the forms and their spacing

The Mono fonts were edited with FontLab to add dotted-zero and slashed-zero sources (on vfc format). Also the fonts had Ligatures and Nerd Fonts glyphs allowing use on terminals and editors.

Some options can be configured via OpenType features:

• Contextual Alternates and Ligatures can be enabled or disabled with "'calt' on" / "'calt' off" or "editor.fontLigatures: true".
• Slashed Zero can be enabled with "'zero' on"
• Empty Zero can be enabled with "'ezer' on"

For example on VSCode, to have ligatures and contextual alternates enabled and keep using the dotted zero, set:

"editor.fontLigatures": true
// or
"editor.fontLigatures": "'calt' on,'zero' off, 'ezer' off",
// or to have ligatures and slashed zero, set:
"editor.fontLigatures": "'calt' on,'zero' on",
// or to have ligatures and empty zero, set:
"editor.fontLigatures": "'calt' on,'ezer' on",

The fonts were Ligaturized using https://github.com/ToxicFrog/Ligaturizer. The ligatures come from Fira Code font originally.

Nerd Fonts glyphs were added to the fonts using Docker container from https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts/.

The modified fonts can be downloaded from ./fonts/ directory.

• fonts/ligatures - Contains both the B612 and B612 Mono fonts with ligatures.
• fonts/ligature-nerd - Contains the B612 and B612 Mono fonts with NerdFonts glyphs and ligatures.
• fonts/original - Contains the original B612 and B612 Mono fonts without any modifications (no ligatures or NerdFonts glyphs) and no dotted/slashed zero sources (original empty zero).
• fonts/plain - Contains the original B612 and B612 Mono fonts with dotted and slashed zero sources.

Inside the fonts/plain and fonts/ligatures directories, there is a subdir called SlashedZero which contains the alternate fonts with slashed zero as default instead of dotted zero (for editors and applications which can't set features/ligatures). They have the same name as the other fonts so can't be installed at the same time.

Below the font Specimen containing the standard alphabet, punctuation and symbols including the default enabled ligatures:

Below additional scripts, blocks and drawing elements:

To build a new version of the font, edit it with FontLab if required, then run the "Export Font As" option, selecting "UFO Package" format and below the format, select all fonts to be exported. Than export again in the same menu but selecting "OpenType TT (.ttf)" format to generate the output fonts in the fonts directory.

To add ligatures to the fonts, use Ligaturizer tool. First clone the repository and install the dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/carlosedp/Ligaturizer
cd Ligaturizer
# copy the fonts to be processed to the fonts directory
cp /path/to/B612/fonts/ttf/*.ttf input/

Edit the ligatures.py file to disable some ligatures if needed (like the /* and */ which looks wrong on some code). Then edit build.py to comment fonts which do not need edit and Also ligaturizer requires fontforge which can be installed with brew install fontforge.

Then run the following command:

make

To add the Nerd Fonts glyphs, go to the fonts directory which contains the otf files, create an output then run the following command (requires Docker or Podman):

mkdir output
docker run -v $(pwd):/in -v $(pwd)/output:/out docker.io/nerdfonts/patcher -c

The patched fonts will be available in the output directory. Move them to the fonts directory and delete the output directories.

Finally to fix the digital signature of the fonts, run the build.sh script from the scripts directory:

./scripts/build.sh

In 2010, Airbus initiated a research collaboration with ENAC and Université de Toulouse III on a prospective study to define and validate an “Aeronautical Font”: the challenge was to improve the display of information on the cockpit screens, in particular in terms of legibility and comfort of reading, and to optimize the overall homogeneity of the cockpit.

2 years later, Airbus came to find Intactile DESIGN to work on the design of the eight typographic variants of the font. This one, baptized B612 in reference to the imaginary asteroid of the aviator Saint‑Exupéry, benefited from a complete hinting on all the characters.

• Update the version number in the font info of the source files
• Make a copy of the source files
• Open the copies in Fontlab
• Run the merge intersection command on each file
• Generate the ttf files
• Run the build script from the scripts folder to fix digital signature

Copyright (c) 2012, AIRBUS (airbus-group.com). All rights reserved.

This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License v2.0 and Eclipse Distribution License v1.0 and the SIL Open Font License v1.1 which accompanies this distribution. The Eclipse Public License is available at https://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v20.html and the Eclipse Distribution License is available at https://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/edl-v10.php. The SIL Open Font License v1.1 is available at https://scripts.sil.org/OFL