| 1 | README - WINDOWS
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| 2 | Gentium Release 1.02
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| 3 | 28 November 2005
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| 4 | ========================
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| 5 | Thank you for your interest in the Gentium fonts.
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| 6 | We hope you find them useful!
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| 7 | Gentium ("belonging to the nations" in Latin) is a Unicode typeface family
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| 8 | designed to enable the many diverse ethnic groups around the world who use
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| 9 | the Latin script to produce readable, high-quality publications. It supports
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| 10 | a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to
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| 11 | all the Latin ranges of Unicode.
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| 12 | The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and
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| 13 | visually attractive. The additional 'extended' Latin letters are designed to
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| 14 | naturally harmonize with the traditional 26 ones. Diacritics are treated
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| 15 | with careful thought and attention to their use. Gentium also supports both
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| 16 | ancient and modern Greek, including a number of alternate forms. It has won
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| 17 | a "Certificate of Excellence in Typeface Design" in two major international
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| 18 | typeface design competitions: bukva:raz! (2001) and TDC2003 (2003).
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| 19 | Gentium provides glyphs for a wide range of Latin and Greek characters.
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| 20 | It currently supports the following ranges of Unicode 3.0 (completely unless
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| 21 | noted):
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| 22 | Range Description
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| 23 | ---------------------------
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| 24 | U+0020-U+007F Basic Latin
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| 25 | U+00A0-U+00FF Latin-1 Supplement
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| 26 | U+0100-U+017F Latin Extended-A
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| 27 | U+0180-U+021F Latin Extended-B
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| 28 | U+0222-U+0233 Latin Extended-B (continued)
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| 29 | U+0250-U+02AD IPA Extensions
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| 30 | U+02B0-U+02FF Spacing Modifier Letters
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| 31 | U+0300-U+036F Combining Diacritical Marks
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| 32 | U+0370-U+03D5 Greek (not including archaic or Coptic)
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| 33 | U+1E00-U+1EFF Latin Extended Additional
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| 34 | U+1F00-U+1FFF Greek Extended
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| 35 | U+2000-U+203A General Punctuation (partial)
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| 36 | U+2070-U+209F Superscripts and Subscripts
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| 37 | U+20A0-U+20CF Currency Symbols (partial)
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| 38 | U+2100-U+214F Letterlike Symbols (only a couple)
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| 39 | Gentium Regular also includes some Cyrillic glyphs, but they are only early
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| 40 | drafts. A future version will include a completely revised set, and will
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| 41 | expand the support for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic to cover Unicode 4.1. It
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| 42 | will also include support for OpenType, Graphite and AAT smart font
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| 43 | technologies.
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| 44 | Gentium is released under the SIL Open Font License.
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| 45 | Gentium is a trademark of SIL International.
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| 46 |
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| 47 | See the OFL and OFL-FAQ for details of the SIL Open Font License.
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| 48 | See the FONTLOG for information on this and previous releases.
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| 49 | See the QUOTES file to read the feedback received from Gentium users.
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| 50 | See the GENTIUM-FAQ file for frequently asked questions and their answers
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| 51 | (such as why there are two families of fonts included).
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| 52 | TIPS
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| 53 | ====
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| 54 | We cannot afford to offer free technical support. The font has, however,
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| 55 | been through some testing on various platforms to be sure it works in most
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| 56 | situations. In particular, it has been tested and shown to work on Windows
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| 57 | 2000 and Windows XP.
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| 58 | If you do find a problem, please do report it to <gentium AT sil DOT org>.
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| 59 | We can't guarantee any direct response, but will try to fix reported bugs in
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| 60 | future versions. Make sure you read through the Gentium FAQ.
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| 61 | Many problems can be solved, or at least explained, through an understanding
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| 62 | of the encoding and use of the fonts. Here are some basic hints:
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| 63 | Encoding:
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| 64 | The fonts are encoded according to Unicode, so your application must support
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| 65 | Unicode text in order to access letters other than the standard alphabet.
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| 66 | Most Windows applications provide basic Unicode support. You will, however,
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| 67 | need some way of entering Unicode text into your document.
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| 68 | Keyboarding:
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| 69 | Gentium does not include any keyboarding helps or utilities. It uses the
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| 70 | built-in keyboards of the operating system. You will need to install the
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| 71 | appropriate keyboard and input method for the characters of the language you
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| 72 | wish to use. If you want to enter characters that are not supported by any
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| 73 | system keyboard, the Keyman program (www.tavultesoft.com) can be helpful.
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| 74 | Another method of entering some symbols is provided by a few applications
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| 75 | such as Adobe InDesign. They can display a glyph palette that shows all the
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| 76 | glyphs (symbols) in a font and allow you to enter them by clicking on the
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| 77 | glyph you want.
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| 78 | Rendering:
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| 79 | Gentium also currently lacks any special font programming that can
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| 80 | substitute one glyph for another or position glyphs in a 'smart' way, such
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| 81 | as in OpenType, Apple Advanced Typography or SIL's Graphite. For example,
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| 82 | although Gentium includes an 'ffl' ligature, there are no special routines
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| 83 | in the font that will automatically substitute 'f'+'f'+'l' with 'ffl', but
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| 84 | an individual application might provide that feature.
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| 85 | INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION
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| 86 | ==============================
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| 87 | In Windows XP, open the Fonts control panel (Start, Control Panel,
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| 88 | Appearance and Themes, then look in the upper left). The drag the font
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| 89 | files (GenR102, GenI102, GenAR102, GenAI102) into the window - or choose
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| 90 | File, Install New Font..., and navigate to the files.
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| 91 | CONTACT
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| 92 | ========
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| 93 | For more information please visit the Gentium page on SIL International's
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| 94 | Computers and Writing systems website:
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| 95 | http://scripts.sil.org/gentium
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| 96 | Or send an email to <gentium AT sil DOT org>
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