1-*-text-*- 2 GNU FreeFont 3 4The GNU FreeFont project aims to provide a useful set of free scalable 5(i.e., OpenType) fonts covering as much as possible of the ISO 10646/Unicode 6UCS (Universal Character Set). 7 8Statement of Purpose 9-------------------- 10 11The practical reason for putting glyphs together in a single font face is 12to conveniently mix symbols and characters from different writing systems, 13without having to switch fonts. 14 15Coverage 16-------- 17 18FreeFont covers the following character ranges 19* Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic, with supplements for many languages 20* Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Thaana, Syriac 21* Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Sinhala, Tamil, Malayalam 22* Thai, Tai Le, Kayah Li, Hanunóo, Buginese 23* Cherokee, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics 24* Ethiopian, Tifnagh, Vai, Osmanya, Coptic 25* Glagolitic, Gothic, Runic, Ugaritic, Old Persian, Phoenician, Old Italic 26* Braille, International Phonetic Alphabet 27* currency symbols, general punctuation and diacritical marks, dingbats 28* mathematical symbols, including much of the TeX repertoire of symbols 29* technical symbols: APL, OCR, arrows, 30* geometrical shapes, box drawing 31* musical symbols, gaming symbols, miscellaneous symbols 32 etc. 33For more detail see <http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/coverage.html> 34 35Editing 36------- 37 38The free outline font editor, George Williams' FontForge 39<http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> is used for editing the fonts. 40 41Design Issues 42------------- 43 44Which font shapes should be made? Historical style terms like Renaissance 45or Baroque letterforms cannot be applied beyond Latin/Cyrillic/Greek 46scripts to any greater extent than Kufi or Nashki can be applied beyond 47Arabic script; "italic" is strictly meaningful only for Latin letters, 48although many scripts such as Cyrillic have a history with "cursive" and 49many others with "oblique" faces. 50 51However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for 52contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and since the 53advent of the typewriter, most have developed a typographic style with 54uniform-width characters. 55 56Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two 57proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with 58modulated stroke - FreeSerif). 59 60The point of having characters from different writing systems in one font 61is that mixed text should look good, and so each FreeFont face contains 62characters of similar style and weight. 63 64Licensing 65--------- 66 67Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or 68modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published 69by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or 70(at your option) any later version. 71 72The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but 73WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY 74or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License 75for more details. 76 77You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along 78with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 7951 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. 80 81As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and 82embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this 83font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the 84GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any 85other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public 86License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your 87version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not 88wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version. 89 90Files and their suffixes 91------------------------ 92 93The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format. 94They may be used to modify the fonts. 95 96TrueType fonts are the files with the .ttf (TrueType Font) suffix. These 97are ready to use in Linux/Unix, on Apple Mac OS, and on Microsoft Windows 98systems. 99 100OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are preferred for use on Linux/Unix, 101but *not* for recent Microsoft Windows systems. 102See the INSTALL file for more information. 103 104Web Open Font Format files (with suffix .woff) are for use in Web sites. 105See the webfont_guidelines.txt for further information. 106 107Further information 108------------------- 109 110Home page of GNU FreeFont: 111 http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/ 112 113More information is at the main project page of Free UCS scalable fonts: 114 http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/ 115 116To report problems with GNU FreeFont, it is best to obtain a Savannah 117account and post reports using that account on 118 https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/ 119 120Public discussions about GNU FreeFont may be posted to the mailing list 121 freefont-bugs@gnu.org 122 123-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 124Original author: Primoz Peterlin 125Current administrator: Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com> 126 127$Id: README,v 1.10 2011-06-12 07:14:12 Stevan_White Exp $ 128