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-*-text-*- |
GNU FreeFont |
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The GNU FreeFont project aims to provide a useful set of free scalable |
(i.e., OpenType) fonts covering as much as possible of the ISO 10646/Unicode |
UCS (Universal Character Set). |
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Statement of Purpose |
-------------------- |
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The practical reason for putting glyphs together in a single font face is |
to conveniently mix symbols and characters from different writing systems, |
without having to switch fonts. |
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Coverage |
-------- |
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FreeFont covers the following character sets |
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* ISO 8859 parts 1-15 |
* CEN MES-3 European Unicode Subset |
http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/cwa13873.pdf |
* IBM/Microsoft code pages 437, 850, 852, 1250, 1252 and more |
* Microsoft/Adobe Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4) |
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/WGL4.htm |
* KOI8-R and KOI8-RU |
* DEC VT100 graphics symbols |
* International Phonetic Alphabet |
* Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian and Thai alphabets, |
including Arabic presentation forms A/B |
* mathematical symbols, including the whole TeX repertoire of symbols |
* APL symbols |
etc. |
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Editing |
------- |
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The free outline font editor, George Williams's FontForge |
<http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> is used for editing the fonts. |
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Design Issues |
------------- |
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Which font shapes should be made? Historical style terms like Renaissance |
or Baroque letterforms cannot be applied beyond Latin/Cyrillic/Greek |
scripts to any greater extent than Kufi or Nashki can be applied beyond |
Arabic script; "italic" is really only meaningful for Latin letters. |
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However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for |
contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and have some |
history with "oblique", faces. Since the advent of the typewriter, most |
have developed a typographic style with uniform-width characters. |
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Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two |
proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with |
modulated stroke - FreeSerif). |
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To make text from different writing systems look good side-by-side, each |
FreeFont face is meant to contain characters of similar style and weight. |
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Licensing |
--------- |
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Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or |
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published |
by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or |
(at your option) any later version. |
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The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but |
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY |
or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License |
for more details. |
|
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along |
with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., |
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 |
embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this |
font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the |
GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any |
other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public |
License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your |
version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not |
wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version. |
|
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Files and their suffixes |
------------------------ |
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The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format. |
Please use these if you plan to modify the font files. |
|
TrueType fonts for immediate consumption are the files with the .ttf |
(TrueType Font) suffix. These are ready to use in Xwindows based |
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. |
Note that although they can be installed on Linux, but many applications |
in Linux still don't support them. |
|
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
Primoz Peterlin, <primoz.peterlin@biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si> |
Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com> |
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Free UCS scalable fonts: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/ |
$Id: README,v 1.6 2008/12/25 12:51:41 Stevan_White Exp $ |