--- title: 'Ubuntu font: what the glyph!' description: Having read some of the comments and bugs I thought it might be useful to add some clarification on a couple of terms. What we have released so far is only the regular weight of the font. Fonts – in general – come in many weights from ultra-light to ultra-bold. The fact that regular is […] url: https://canonical.com/blog/ubuntu-font-what-the-glyph?format=md --- 1. [Blog](https://canonical.com/blog) 2. Article --- [Canonical](https://canonical.com/blog/author/canonical "More about Canonical") 8 July 2010 # Ubuntu font: what the glyph! [Design](https://canonical.com/blog/tag/design) --- Share the article Having read some of the comments and bugs I thought it might be useful to add some clarification on a couple of terms. What we have released so far is only the regular weight of the font. Fonts – in general – come in many weights from ultra-light to ultra-bold. The fact that regular is the only weight that is complete so far, means that when you look at items that are set to be bold in the Ubuntu Beta font your computer is guessing at how best to display the font bold. Bold is coming as are other weights and variants such as monospace, italics, etc. Monospace is primarily used in the terminal and in applications such as xchat. The regular which is available now, is not going to work as well as the monospace if you use it in the terminal or in xchat etc. This regular weight is fully hinted and kerned for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic so there is still plenty to try out. Hinting is the process of telling your computer what to do with the individual pixels that make up a glyph. [Wikipedia has a detailed explanation (of course)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting). Kerning is the process of defining how much space there should be between individual glyphs (characters). [And here is the wikipedia information on kerning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning) . For those of you who know all this – excellent! For those of you who don’t – I do hope this helps! [Get in touch Interested in running Ubuntu in your organization?](https://ubuntu.com/about/contact-us/form) ## Sign up for our newsletter Get the latest Canonical news and updates in your inbox. Work email: \*I agree to receive information about Canonical's products and services. By submitting this form, I confirm that I have read and agree to [Canonical's Privacy Policy](https://canonical.com/legal/dataprivacy). Sign up ## Share on --- ## Related posts [### Challenges designers face in open source (and how to fix them)](https://canonical.com/blog/challenges-designers-face-in-open-source-and-how-to-fix-them) Open source powers up to 90% of modern software, yet many projects lack usability. Canonical’s Design team surveyed 115 cross-functional professionals to uncover the 4 core... [Kola Ojoodide](https://canonical.com/blog/author/kola-ojoodide) 26 June 2026 [### Why web engineering is great](https://canonical.com/blog/why-web-engineering-is-great) Hi, I’m Johann! I’m an engineering manager in Canonical’s web team. For the larger part of my 15 years of work experience as engineer, I’ve been working in web development.... [Johann Wolf](https://canonical.com/blog/author/johannwolf) 27 April 2026 [### Canonical’s recipe for High Performance Computing](https://canonical.com/blog/canonicals-recipe-for-high-performance-computing) In essence, High Performance Computing (HPC) is quite simple. Speed and scale. In practice, the concept is quite complex and hard to achieve. It is not dissimilar to what... [Igor Ljubuncic](https://canonical.com/blog/author/igorljubuncic) 24 January 2024 [### Web team – hack week 2023](https://canonical.com/blog/web-team-hack-week-2023) Today, around 96% of software projects utilize open source in some way. The web team here at Canonical is passionate about Open source. We lead with an open-by-default approach... [Anthony Dillon](https://canonical.com/blog/author/ya-bo-ng) 25 October 2023