The original release of
Gentium had roman and italic typefaces. It included 1,700
glyphs, with 1,500 characters covering most of the
Latin range defined by Unicode at the time, as well as
monotonic and
polytonic Greek, which were designed to flow in harmony with the Latin. The roman typeface included basic
Cyrillic.
GentiumAlt Early releases of Gentium came with a variant called
GentiumAlt ("Gentium Alternative"), which contained flatter
diacritics intended to improve the appearance of stacked diacritics, which might otherwise overstrike adjacent lines of text, as well as a glyph variant of the
Greek circumflex that resembled an
inverted breve. These features are now handled as stylistic variants within the main Gentium font.
Gentium Basic In November 2007, the Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts were released, expanding Gentium fonts to four faces: regular, italic, bold, and bold italic. Gentium Basic had the same
weight as the main Gentium fonts, while Gentium Book Basic was set at a slightly heavier weight for publishing. While these fonts added bold and bold italic typefaces, they did not contain the full range of Gentium characters, especially in the Greek and phonetic-symbol ranges.
Gentium Plus An updated version of the roman and italic fonts called
Gentium Plus, which added 3,800 glyphs to support the full ranges of Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic defined by Unicode at the time, was released in November 2010. Released shortly afterward was a variant called "Gentium Plus Compact", which had compact spacing for aesthetic reasons when the wide spacing of basic Gentium was not needed for stacked diacritics. They had over 5500 glyphs, but did not come in bold typefaces. After the initial release of the Gentium Plus fonts, the focus of the project shifted to completing bold and bold italic weights of the Gentium Plus family, as well as the creation of the
Gentium Book Plus family with a slightly heavier weight.
Gentium 7 Gentium version 7, released in June 2025, was a major update, unifying Gentium Plus, Gentium Basic and Gentium Book into a single set of fonts. The unified Gentium now has five font weights, with the Gentium Book regular and bold weights continued as Gentium medium and Gentium extra-bold. (Also available is semi-bold.) Kerning was expanded from Gentium Basic, primarily for IPA letters with hooks; it is expansive but applies to large sets of characters rather than to individual characters. The vertical placement of IPA tie bars was adjusted for ascenders and descenders – or the lack thereof – but in the case of the under-tie, this does not work with letters where diacritics tuck up behind the descender, namely
p,
q,
y and letters with a retroflex hook. The 9-pitch intonation contours were removed from the PUA. The line spacing was changed to be intermediate between those of Gentium Plus and Gentium Compact. The file name was changed so that Gentium 6.2 and Gentium 7 could be installed on the same system, as converting a document from Gentium 6.2 to Gentium 7 would cause repagination due to the difference in line spacing and the introduction of kerning. ==Character variants==