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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 ranges
- * Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic, with supplements for many languages
- * Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Thaana, Syriac
- * Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Sinhala, Tamil, Malayalam
- * Thai, Tai Le, Kayah Li, Hanunóo, Buginese
- * Cherokee, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
- * Ethiopian, Tifnagh, Vai, Osmanya, Coptic
- * Glagolitic, Gothic, Runic, Ugaritic, Old Persian, Phoenician, Old Italic
- * Braille, International Phonetic Alphabet
- * currency symbols, general punctuation and diacritical marks, dingbats
- * mathematical symbols, including much of the TeX repertoire of symbols
- * technical symbols: APL, OCR, arrows,
- * geometrical shapes, box drawing
- * musical symbols, gaming symbols, miscellaneous symbols
- etc.
- For more detail see <http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/coverage.html>
-
- Editing
- -------
-
- The free outline font editor, George Williams' 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 strictly meaningful only for Latin letters,
- although many scripts such as Cyrillic have a history with "cursive" and
- many others with "oblique" faces.
-
- However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for
- contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and 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).
-
- The point of having characters from different writing systems in one font
- is that mixed text should look good, and so each FreeFont face contains
- 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.
- They may be used to modify the fonts.
-
- TrueType fonts are the files with the .ttf (TrueType Font) suffix. These
- are ready to use in Linux/Unix, on Apple Mac OS, and on Microsoft Windows
- systems.
-
- OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are preferred for use on Linux/Unix,
- but *not* for recent Microsoft Windows systems.
- See the INSTALL file for more information.
-
- Web Open Font Format files (with suffix .woff) are for use in Web sites.
- See the webfont_guidelines.txt for further information.
-
- Further information
- -------------------
-
- Home page of GNU FreeFont:
- http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/
-
- More information is at the main project page of Free UCS scalable fonts:
- http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
-
- To report problems with GNU FreeFont, it is best to obtain a Savannah
- account and post reports using that account on
- https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/
-
- Public discussions about GNU FreeFont may be posted to the mailing list
- freefont-bugs@gnu.org
-
- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Original author: Primoz Peterlin
- Current administrator: Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com>
-
- $Id: README,v 1.10 2011-06-12 07:14:12 Stevan_White Exp $
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