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Usage of GNU FreeFont
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Language scripts and faces
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==========================
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There are three faces (serif, sans-serif, and monospace), and four styles
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(regular, bold, cursive/italic, and bold cursive/italic) for each face.
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There is one font file per face/style combination: 12 files in total.
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The letters for various languages, as well as specialized symbols, exist
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among the various font files, but they are not uniformly populated.
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All the fonts have complete support for Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek, as
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well as most of the extensions for those scripts.
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At this time, serif regular has by far the largest number of letters, and
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supports the largest number of writing scripts. However there are writing
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scripts supported by the sans-serif but not by serif.
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For an overview of which scripts and sets of symbols are supported by
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which face, see the FreeFont 'coverage' web page.
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Font features
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=============
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FreeFont has numerous font "features" that perform alterations to the basic
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letters of the font, replacing them with other letters, or positioning them
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with respect to other letters.
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Many features are activated automatically, but in some environments, they
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present some user control. This documents those features with user control.
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Language-specific features
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==========================
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Some OpenType font features are activated only when the text is specified to
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be of a certain language.
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This is done in HTML by enclosing the text with a tag whose 'lang' attribute
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is set to the appropriate ISO 632.2 language code. In a word processor,
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any block of text can be given a language setting.
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Latin
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-----
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Catalan ligature improving l·l
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Dutch ligatures for ij, IJ
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Sami localized form for letter Eng
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Turkish overrides ligatures fi ffi of Latin
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Cyrillic
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--------
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Ukrainian ligature for double i-diaresis
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Serbian/Macedonian localized letters be, and more in italic
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Bulgarian style set for modern glyphs
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Hebrew
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------
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Yiddish raised vowels under yo
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Devanagari
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----------
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Sanskrit much larger set of ligatures
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Hindi, Marathi better spacing of Western punctuation marks
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Indic languages
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---------------
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The 'danda' character is encoded in Unicode only in the Devanagari range.
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When writing in scripts of other Indic languages, this same character is to
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be used. But the shapes and line thicknesses of glyphs vary slightly from
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one script to another, so the same glyph for 'danda' may not fit all scripts.
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By specifying the language of the text, an appropriate glyph for 'danda'
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will be obtained.
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Style sets
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==========
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These replacements are activated by specifying a "Style Set".
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These features are accessible only from typesetting software.
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Cyrillic Bulgarian modern (ss01)
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Devanagari Bombay (ss02), Calcutta (ss03), Nepali (ss04)
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Discretionary features
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======================
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These features are accessible only from typesetting software.
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Typically the user must specifically request them.
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Unless otherwise noted, these are available only in FreeSerif.
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Ligatures and substitutions
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---------------------------
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Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, German, Dutch
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Small captials
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--------------
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A limited set of specially drawn small capital letters in Latin.
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Superscript and subscript
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-------------------------
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Transform a limited set of characters--mostly Latin letters and numerals--
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to versions well-sized and positioned as superscript or subscript.
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Numeral styles
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--------------
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The default numerals of FreeSerif are mono-spaced and of even height.
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It also features proportionally-spaced numerals, and "old-style" numerals--
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those which vary in height and sometimes go beneath the baseline.
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These can be had at discretion.
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Diagonal fractions
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------------------
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A limited set of diagonal fraction substitutions are available at discretion.
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The set is more than what is encoded in Unicode.
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They work with the ASCII slash or the mathematical slash U+2215.
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The transform a sequence "number-slash-number" to a diagonal form.
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Zero
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----
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A slashed form of the numeral zero is available at discretion.
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Available in all faces.
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Alternative characters
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======================
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FreeSerif has some listings of alternatives for specific characters.
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Again this is use primarily in specialized typesetting software.
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Greek, Latin
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Use in LaTeX
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============
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It is possible to use Unicode fonts in recent LaTeX implementations, but in
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LuaTeX http://www.luatex.org/ and
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XeTeX http://tug.org/xetex/
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it is particularly easy to use Unicode text, and to enable font features.
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Recent versions of these systems use the 'fontspec' package to choose fonts
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and features.
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A very simple document might contain the lines
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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\documentclass{ltxdockit}
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\usepackage{fontspec}
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\usepackage{xunicode}
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\setmainfont[]{FreeSerif}
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\begin{document}
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{\fontspec[Script=Default,Fractions={On}]{FreeSerif}
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1/7 3/10 7/10}
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x\raisebox{-0.5ex}{{\scriptsize ai}}
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x{\fontspec[Script=Default,VerticalPosition={Inferior}]{FreeSerif}
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abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+−(0123456789)} \\
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x\raisebox{0.85ex}{{\scriptsize ai}}
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x{\fontspec[Script=Default,VerticalPosition={Superior}]{FreeSerif}
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abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+−(0123456789)}
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{\fontspec[Script=Latin]{FreeSerif}
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\textsc{Small Caps} }
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{ Bсички хора се раждат свободни и равни по достойнство и права.
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\fontspec[Script=Cyrillic,Language=Bulgarian,Variant={1}]{FreeSerif} \selectfont
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Bсички хора се раждат свободни и равни по достойнство и права. }
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\end{document}
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Here are some 'fontspec' setting-value pairs meaningful for FreeFont.
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Numbers: Lining OldStyle Proportional SlashedZero
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Fractions: On
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VerticalPosition: Superior Inferior
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Ligatures: Common Historical
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Letters: UppercaseSmallCaps
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Variant: 1 (etc. -- must be in {} picks style set.)
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---------------------------------------------------------------------------
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$Id: usage.txt,v 1.10 2011-07-16 08:38:06 Stevan_White Exp $
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