Nimbus Sans

Nimbus Sans

It is a version using URW++ font source. The family supports Western Europe, East Europe, Turkish, Baltic, Romanian languages.

Some of the fonts have history predating Helvetica's first release. For example, Nimbus Sans bold condensed, Nimbus Sans bold condensed (D) were dated 1940; Nimbus Sans Black Condensed, Nimbus Sans Black Condensed (D) were dated 1946.

The font names ending with (D) have slightly lighter font weights and tighter spacing.

Nimbus Sans Poster

It is a version of Nimbus Sans with even tighter spacing than the Nimbus Sans (D) fonts. Other changes include alternate designs for currency symbols.

Nimbus Sans Diagonal

It is a version with more right lean than Nimbus Sans italic fonts. The family currently only includes 1 font, in Black weight in medium width.

Nimbus Sans Mono

It is a monospaced variant of Nimbus Sans. The family currently only includes 1 font, in Regular weight in medium width.

Nimbus Sans Global

It is a family supporting Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, CJK ideographic, Japanese kanam, Korean Hangul syllables, Thai characters. The family includes 5 fonts in 1 (medium) width, with 4 proportional an 1 monospaced fonts. The proportional fonts are in 4 weights (bold, medium, regular, light), while the monospace font is in medium weight.

Nimbus Sans L

Nimbus Sans L is a version of Nimbus Sans using Adobe font sources. It was designed in 1987. The family includes 17 fonts in 5 weights and 2 widths, with Nimbus Sans L Extra Black only available in condensed roman format.

A subset of Nimbus Sans L, which includes regular and bold weight fonts in all widths and styles, were released under the GPL and AFPL in Type 1 format in 1996 and LPPL in 2009, and is one of several freely licensed fonts offered by URW++.

Although the characters are not exactly the same, Nimbus Sans L has metrics almost identical to Helvetica and Arial. Nimbus Sans L is one of the Ghostscript fonts, a set of free alternatives to the 35 basic PostScript fonts (which include Helvetica).

It is a standard typeface in many GNU/Linux distributions. It was used as default font in OpenOffice.org Calc and Impress in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu - up to version 8.10; since Ubuntu 9.04 the default font was changed to Liberation Sans).

Ghostscript version

It was extended to include Cyrillic support by Valek Filippov.

Nimbus Sans Novus

It is a version Linotype's Stempel Studio source, based on Neue Helvetica, but without the extended fonts.

The font names ending with (D) have tighter letter spacing.