README 5.0 KB

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  1. -*-text-*-
  2. GNU FreeFont
  3. The GNU FreeFont project aims to provide a useful set of free scalable
  4. (i.e., OpenType) fonts covering as much as possible of the ISO 10646/Unicode
  5. UCS (Universal Character Set).
  6. Statement of Purpose
  7. --------------------
  8. The practical reason for putting glyphs together in a single font face is
  9. to conveniently mix symbols and characters from different writing systems,
  10. without having to switch fonts.
  11. Coverage
  12. --------
  13. FreeFont covers the following character ranges
  14. * Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic, with supplements for many languages
  15. * Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Thaana, Syriac
  16. * Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Sinhala, Tamil, Malayalam
  17. * Thai, Tai Le, Kayah Li, Hanunóo, Buginese
  18. * Cherokee, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
  19. * Ethiopian, Tifnagh, Vai, Osmanya, Coptic
  20. * Glagolitic, Gothic, Runic, Ugaritic, Old Persian, Phoenician, Old Italic
  21. * Braille, International Phonetic Alphabet
  22. * currency symbols, general punctuation and diacritical marks, dingbats
  23. * mathematical symbols, including much of the TeX repertoire of symbols
  24. * technical symbols: APL, OCR, arrows,
  25. * geometrical shapes, box drawing
  26. * musical symbols, gaming symbols, miscellaneous symbols
  27. etc.
  28. For more detail see <http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/coverage.html>
  29. Editing
  30. -------
  31. The free outline font editor, George Williams' FontForge
  32. <http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> is used for editing the fonts.
  33. Design Issues
  34. -------------
  35. Which font shapes should be made? Historical style terms like Renaissance
  36. or Baroque letterforms cannot be applied beyond Latin/Cyrillic/Greek
  37. scripts to any greater extent than Kufi or Nashki can be applied beyond
  38. Arabic script; "italic" is strictly meaningful only for Latin letters,
  39. although many scripts such as Cyrillic have a history with "cursive" and
  40. many others with "oblique" faces.
  41. However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for
  42. contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and since the
  43. advent of the typewriter, most have developed a typographic style with
  44. uniform-width characters.
  45. Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two
  46. proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with
  47. modulated stroke - FreeSerif).
  48. The point of having characters from different writing systems in one font
  49. is that mixed text should look good, and so each FreeFont face contains
  50. characters of similar style and weight.
  51. Licensing
  52. ---------
  53. Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
  54. modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
  55. by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
  56. (at your option) any later version.
  57. The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but
  58. WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
  59. or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
  60. for more details.
  61. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
  62. with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
  63. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
  64. As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and
  65. embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this
  66. font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the
  67. GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any
  68. other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public
  69. License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your
  70. version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not
  71. wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
  72. Files and their suffixes
  73. ------------------------
  74. The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format.
  75. They may be used to modify the fonts.
  76. TrueType fonts are the files with the .ttf (TrueType Font) suffix. These
  77. are ready to use in Linux/Unix, on Apple Mac OS, and on Microsoft Windows
  78. systems.
  79. OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are preferred for use on Linux/Unix,
  80. but *not* for recent Microsoft Windows systems.
  81. See the INSTALL file for more information.
  82. Web Open Font Format files (with suffix .woff) are for use in Web sites.
  83. See the webfont_guidelines.txt for further information.
  84. Further information
  85. -------------------
  86. Home page of GNU FreeFont:
  87. http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/
  88. More information is at the main project page of Free UCS scalable fonts:
  89. http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
  90. To report problems with GNU FreeFont, it is best to obtain a Savannah
  91. account and post reports using that account on
  92. https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/
  93. Public discussions about GNU FreeFont may be posted to the mailing list
  94. freefont-bugs@gnu.org
  95. --------------------------------------------------------------------------
  96. Original author: Primoz Peterlin
  97. Current administrator: Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com>
  98. $Id: README,v 1.10 2011-06-12 07:14:12 Stevan_White Exp $