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- -*-text-*-
- GNU FreeFont
-
- 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).
-
- Statement of Purpose
- --------------------
-
- 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.
-
- Coverage
- --------
-
- FreeFont covers the following character sets
-
- * 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.
-
- Editing
- -------
-
- The free outline font editor, George Williams's FontForge
- <http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> is used for editing the fonts.
-
- Design Issues
- -------------
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two
- proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with
- modulated stroke - FreeSerif).
-
- 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.
-
- Licensing
- ---------
-
- 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 3 of the License, or
- (at your option) any later version.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
-
- Files and their suffixes
- ------------------------
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
-
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Primoz Peterlin, <primoz.peterlin@biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si>
- Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com>
-
- Free UCS scalable fonts: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
- $Id: README,v 1.7 2009/01/13 08:43:23 Stevan_White Exp $
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