| 1 | -*-text-*-
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| 2 | GNU FreeFont
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| 3 |
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| 4 | The GNU FreeFont project aims to provide a useful set of free scalable
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| 5 | (i.e., OpenType) fonts covering as much as possible of the ISO 10646/Unicode
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| 6 | UCS (Universal Character Set).
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| 7 |
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| 8 | Statement of Purpose
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| 9 | --------------------
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| 10 |
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| 11 | The practical reason for putting glyphs together in a single font face is
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| 12 | to conveniently mix symbols and characters from different writing systems,
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| 13 | without having to switch fonts.
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| 14 |
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| 15 | Coverage
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| 16 | --------
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| 17 |
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| 18 | FreeFont covers the following character sets
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| 19 |
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| 20 | * ISO 8859 parts 1-15
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| 21 | * CEN MES-3 European Unicode Subset
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| 22 | http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/cwa13873.pdf
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| 23 | * IBM/Microsoft code pages 437, 850, 852, 1250, 1252 and more
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| 24 | * Microsoft/Adobe Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4)
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| 25 | http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/WGL4.htm
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| 26 | * KOI8-R and KOI8-RU
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| 27 | * DEC VT100 graphics symbols
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| 28 | * International Phonetic Alphabet
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| 29 | * Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian and Thai alphabets,
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| 30 | including Arabic presentation forms A/B
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| 31 | * mathematical symbols, including the whole TeX repertoire of symbols
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| 32 | * APL symbols
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| 33 | etc.
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| 34 |
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| 35 | Editing
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| 36 | -------
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| 37 |
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| 38 | The free outline font editor, George Williams's FontForge
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| 39 | <http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> is used for editing the fonts.
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| 40 |
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| 41 | Design Issues
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| 42 | -------------
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| 43 |
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| 44 | Which font shapes should be made? Historical style terms like Renaissance
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| 45 | or Baroque letterforms cannot be applied beyond Latin/Cyrillic/Greek
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| 46 | scripts to any greater extent than Kufi or Nashki can be applied beyond
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| 47 | Arabic script; "italic" is really only meaningful for Latin letters.
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| 48 |
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| 49 | However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for
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| 50 | contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and have some
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| 51 | history with "oblique", faces. Since the advent of the typewriter, most
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| 52 | have developed a typographic style with uniform-width characters.
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| 53 |
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| 54 | Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two
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| 55 | proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with
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| 56 | modulated stroke - FreeSerif).
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| 57 |
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| 58 | To make text from different writing systems look good side-by-side, each
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| 59 | FreeFont face is meant to contain characters of similar style and weight.
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| 60 |
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| 61 | Licensing
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| 62 | ---------
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| 63 |
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| 64 | Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
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| 65 | modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
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| 66 | by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
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| 67 | (at your option) any later version.
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| 68 |
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| 69 | The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but
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| 70 | WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
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| 71 | or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
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| 72 | for more details.
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| 73 |
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| 74 | You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
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| 75 | with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
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| 76 | 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
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| 77 |
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| 78 | As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and
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| 79 | embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this
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| 80 | font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the
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| 81 | GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any
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| 82 | other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public
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| 83 | License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your
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| 84 | version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not
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| 85 | wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
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| 86 |
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| 87 |
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| 88 | Files and their suffixes
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| 89 | ------------------------
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| 90 |
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| 91 | The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format.
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| 92 | Please use these if you plan to modify the font files.
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| 93 |
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| 94 | TrueType fonts for immediate consumption are the files with the .ttf
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| 95 | (TrueType Font) suffix. These are ready to use in Xwindows based
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| 96 | systems using FreeType, on Mac OS, and on older Windows systems.
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| 97 |
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| 98 | OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are for use in Windows Vista.
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| 99 | Note that although they can be installed on Linux, but many applications
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| 100 | in Linux still don't support them.
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| 101 |
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| 102 |
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| 103 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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| 104 | Primoz Peterlin, <primoz.peterlin@biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si>
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| 105 | Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com>
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| 106 |
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| 107 | Free UCS scalable fonts: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
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| 108 | $Id: README,v 1.7 2009/01/13 08:43:23 Stevan_White Exp $
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