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