Apple Chooses Athelas for iBooks

July 2012

The Typography unit at Apple requested a version of our Athelas typeface to include in their successful e-book reader, the iBooks mobile app. A character set extension was needed so that Athelas would support dictionaries, scholarly journals, and publications in different languages. The language extension requested by Apple includes several additions to the Latin A range, Latin B (used in languages from Africa and Southeast Asia), Polytonic Greek, Extended Cyrillic, and full International Phonetic Alphabet (used in dictionaries and other academic texts). As a result, Apple’s Athelas is bursting with over 2400 glyphs while the retail version has 950.

A tailored expansion of TypeTogether's Athelas font package
A tailored expansion of TypeTogether's Athelas font package


screen optimising process

Later on Apple Inc. decided to ship the customised version of Athelas with their Mavericks operating system. TypeTogether produced a screen-optimised version (hinted) that can perform on the web and on additional operating systems.

Hinting is the process by which fonts are adjusted for optimal rendering on computer screens. Hinting uses mathematical instructions to adjust the display of a font’s outline so important parts of lettershapes such as stems or x-height appear consistent on a low resolution grid. At low screen resolutions, hinting is critical for producing clear, legible text.

                          
A tailored expansion of TypeTogether's Athelas font package
                          
A tailored expansion of TypeTogether's Athelas font package

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