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