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 sets 19 20* ISO 8859 parts 1-15 21* CEN MES-3 European Unicode Subset 22 http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/cwa13873.pdf 23* IBM/Microsoft code pages 437, 850, 852, 1250, 1252 and more 24* Microsoft/Adobe Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4) 25 http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/WGL4.htm 26* KOI8-R and KOI8-RU 27* DEC VT100 graphics symbols 28* International Phonetic Alphabet 29* Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian and Thai alphabets, 30 including Arabic presentation forms A/B 31* mathematical symbols, including the whole TeX repertoire of symbols 32* APL symbols 33 etc. 34 35Editing 36------- 37 38The free outline font editor, George Williams's 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 really only meaningful for Latin letters. 48 49However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for 50contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and have some 51history with "oblique", faces. Since the advent of the typewriter, most 52have developed a typographic style with uniform-width characters. 53 54Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two 55proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with 56modulated stroke - FreeSerif). 57 58To make text from different writing systems look good side-by-side, each 59FreeFont face is meant to contain characters of similar style and weight. 60 61Licensing 62--------- 63 64Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or 65modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published 66by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or 67(at your option) any later version. 68 69The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but 70WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY 71or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License 72for more details. 73 74You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along 75with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 7651 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. 77 78As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and 79embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this 80font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the 81GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any 82other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public 83License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your 84version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not 85wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version. 86 87 88Files and their suffixes 89------------------------ 90 91The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format. 92Please use these if you plan to modify the font files. 93 94TrueType fonts for immediate consumption are the files with the .ttf 95(TrueType Font) suffix. These are ready to use in Xwindows based 96systems using FreeType, on Mac OS, and on older Windows systems. 97 98OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are for use in Windows Vista. 99Note that although they can be installed on Linux, but many applications 100in Linux still don't support them. 101 102 103-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 104Primoz Peterlin, <primoz.peterlin@biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si> 105Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com> 106 107Free UCS scalable fonts: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/ 108$Id: README,v 1.7 2009/01/13 08:43:23 Stevan_White Exp $ 109