| [347] | 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 ranges
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| 19 | * Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic, with supplements for many languages
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| 20 | * Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Thaana, Syriac
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| 21 | * Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Sinhala, Tamil, Malayalam
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| 22 | * Thai, Tai Le, Kayah Li, Hanunóo, Buginese
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| 23 | * Cherokee, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
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| 24 | * Ethiopian, Tifnagh, Vai, Osmanya, Coptic
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| 25 | * Glagolitic, Gothic, Runic, Ugaritic, Old Persian, Phoenician, Old Italic
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| 26 | * Braille, International Phonetic Alphabet
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| 27 | * currency symbols, general punctuation and diacritical marks, dingbats
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| 28 | * mathematical symbols, including much of the TeX repertoire of symbols
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| 29 | * technical symbols: APL, OCR, arrows,
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| 30 | * geometrical shapes, box drawing
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| 31 | * musical symbols, gaming symbols, miscellaneous symbols
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| 32 | etc.
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| 33 | For more detail see <http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/coverage.html>
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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' 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 strictly meaningful only for Latin letters,
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| 48 | although many scripts such as Cyrillic have a history with "cursive" and
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| 49 | many others with "oblique" faces.
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| 50 |
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| 51 | However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for
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| 52 | contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and since the
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| 53 | advent of the typewriter, most have developed a typographic style with
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| 54 | uniform-width characters.
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| 55 |
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| 56 | Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two
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| 57 | proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with
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| 58 | modulated stroke - FreeSerif).
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| 59 |
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| 60 | The point of having characters from different writing systems in one font
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| 61 | is that mixed text should look good, and so each FreeFont face contains
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| 62 | characters of similar style and weight.
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| 63 |
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| 64 | Licensing
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| 65 | ---------
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| 66 |
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| 67 | Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
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| 68 | modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
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| 69 | by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
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| 70 | (at your option) any later version.
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| 71 |
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| 72 | The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but
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| 73 | WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
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| 74 | or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
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| 75 | for more details.
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| 76 |
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| 77 | You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
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| 78 | with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
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| 79 | 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
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| 80 |
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| 81 | As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and
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| 82 | embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this
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| 83 | font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the
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| 84 | GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any
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| 85 | other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public
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| 86 | License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your
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| 87 | version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not
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| 88 | wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
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| 89 |
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| 90 | Files and their suffixes
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| 91 | ------------------------
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| 92 |
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| 93 | The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format.
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| 94 | They may be used to modify the fonts.
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| 95 |
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| 96 | TrueType fonts are the files with the .ttf (TrueType Font) suffix. These
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| 97 | are ready to use in Linux/Unix, on Apple Mac OS, and on Microsoft Windows
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| 98 | systems.
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| 99 |
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| 100 | OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are preferred for use on Linux/Unix,
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| 101 | but *not* for recent Microsoft Windows systems.
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| 102 | See the INSTALL file for more information.
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| 103 |
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| 104 | Web Open Font Format files (with suffix .woff) are for use in Web sites.
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| 105 | See the webfont_guidelines.txt for further information.
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| 106 |
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| 107 | Further information
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| 108 | -------------------
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| 109 |
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| 110 | Home page of GNU FreeFont:
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| 111 | http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/
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| 112 |
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| 113 | More information is at the main project page of Free UCS scalable fonts:
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| 114 | http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
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| 115 |
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| 116 | To report problems with GNU FreeFont, it is best to obtain a Savannah
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| 117 | account and post reports using that account on
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| 118 | https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/
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| 119 |
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| 120 | Public discussions about GNU FreeFont may be posted to the mailing list
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| 121 | freefont-bugs@gnu.org
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| 122 |
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| 123 | --------------------------------------------------------------------------
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| 124 | Original author: Primoz Peterlin
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| 125 | Current administrator: Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com>
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| 126 |
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| 127 | $Id: README,v 1.10 2011-06-12 07:14:12 Stevan_White Exp $
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