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  1. -*-text-*-
  2. GNU FreeFont
  3. The GNU FreeFont project aims to provide a useful set of free scalable
  4. (i.e., OpenType) fonts covering as much as possible of the ISO 10646/Unicode
  5. UCS (Universal Character Set).
  6. Statement of Purpose
  7. --------------------
  8. The practical reason for putting glyphs together in a single font face is
  9. to conveniently mix symbols and characters from different writing systems,
  10. without having to switch fonts.
  11. Coverage
  12. --------
  13. FreeFont covers the following character sets
  14. * ISO 8859 parts 1-15
  15. * CEN MES-3 European Unicode Subset
  16. http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/cwa13873.pdf
  17. * IBM/Microsoft code pages 437, 850, 852, 1250, 1252 and more
  18. * Microsoft/Adobe Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4)
  19. http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/WGL4.htm
  20. * KOI8-R and KOI8-RU
  21. * DEC VT100 graphics symbols
  22. * International Phonetic Alphabet
  23. * Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian and Thai alphabets,
  24. including Arabic presentation forms A/B
  25. * mathematical symbols, including the whole TeX repertoire of symbols
  26. * APL symbols
  27. etc.
  28. Editing
  29. -------
  30. The free outline font editor, George Williams's FontForge
  31. <http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> is used for editing the fonts.
  32. Design Issues
  33. -------------
  34. Which font shapes should be made? Historical style terms like Renaissance
  35. or Baroque letterforms cannot be applied beyond Latin/Cyrillic/Greek
  36. scripts to any greater extent than Kufi or Nashki can be applied beyond
  37. Arabic script; "italic" is really only meaningful for Latin letters.
  38. However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for
  39. contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and have some
  40. history with "oblique", faces. Since the advent of the typewriter, most
  41. have developed a typographic style with uniform-width characters.
  42. Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two
  43. proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with
  44. modulated stroke - FreeSerif).
  45. To make text from different writing systems look good side-by-side, each
  46. FreeFont face is meant to contain characters of similar style and weight.
  47. Licensing
  48. ---------
  49. Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
  50. modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
  51. by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
  52. (at your option) any later version.
  53. The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but
  54. WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
  55. or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
  56. for more details.
  57. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
  58. with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
  59. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
  60. As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and
  61. embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this
  62. font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the
  63. GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any
  64. other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public
  65. License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your
  66. version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not
  67. wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
  68. Files and their suffixes
  69. ------------------------
  70. The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format.
  71. Please use these if you plan to modify the font files.
  72. TrueType fonts for immediate consumption are the files with the .ttf
  73. (TrueType Font) suffix. These are ready to use in Xwindows based
  74. systems using FreeType, on Mac OS, and on older Windows systems.
  75. OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are for use in Windows Vista.
  76. Note that although they can be installed on Linux, but many applications
  77. in Linux still don't support them.
  78. --------------------------------------------------------------------------
  79. Primoz Peterlin, <primoz.peterlin@biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si>
  80. Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com>
  81. Free UCS scalable fonts: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
  82. $Id: README,v 1.7 2009/01/13 08:43:23 Stevan_White Exp $