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-*-text-*-
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GNU FreeFont
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The GNU FreeFont project aims to provide a useful set of free scalable
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(i.e., OpenType) fonts covering as much as possible of the ISO 10646/Unicode
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UCS (Universal Character Set).
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Statement of Purpose
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--------------------
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The practical reason for putting glyphs together in a single font face is
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to conveniently mix symbols and characters from different writing systems,
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without having to switch fonts.
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Coverage
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--------
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FreeFont covers the following character sets
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* ISO 8859 parts 1-15
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* CEN MES-3 European Unicode Subset
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http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/cwa13873.pdf
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* IBM/Microsoft code pages 437, 850, 852, 1250, 1252 and more
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* Microsoft/Adobe Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4)
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http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/WGL4.htm
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* KOI8-R and KOI8-RU
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* DEC VT100 graphics symbols
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* International Phonetic Alphabet
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* Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian and Thai alphabets,
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including Arabic presentation forms A/B
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* mathematical symbols, including the whole TeX repertoire of symbols
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* APL symbols
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etc.
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Editing
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-------
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The free outline font editor, George Williams's FontForge
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<http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> is used for editing the fonts.
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Design Issues
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-------------
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Which font shapes should be made? Historical style terms like Renaissance
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or Baroque letterforms cannot be applied beyond Latin/Cyrillic/Greek
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scripts to any greater extent than Kufi or Nashki can be applied beyond
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Arabic script; "italic" is really only meaningful for Latin letters.
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However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for
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contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and have some
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history with "oblique", faces. Since the advent of the typewriter, most
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have developed a typographic style with uniform-width characters.
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Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two
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proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with
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modulated stroke - FreeSerif).
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To make text from different writing systems look good side-by-side, each
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FreeFont face is meant to contain characters of similar style and weight.
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Licensing
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---------
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Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
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modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
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by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
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(at your option) any later version.
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The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but
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WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
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or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
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for more details.
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You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
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with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
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51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
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As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and
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embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this
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font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the
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GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any
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other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public
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License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your
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version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not
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wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
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Files and their suffixes
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------------------------
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The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format.
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Please use these if you plan to modify the font files.
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TrueType fonts for immediate consumption are the files with the .ttf
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(TrueType Font) suffix. These are ready to use in Xwindows based
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systems using FreeType, on Mac OS, and on older Windows systems.
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OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are for use in Windows Vista.
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Note that although they can be installed on Linux, but many applications
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in Linux still don't support them.
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Primoz Peterlin, <primoz.peterlin@biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si>
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Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com>
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Free UCS scalable fonts: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
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$Id: README,v 1.7 2009/01/13 08:43:23 Stevan_White Exp $
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