-*-text-*- Summary: This project aims to provide a set of free scalable (i.e., OpenType) fonts covering the ISO 10646/Unicode UCS (Universal Character Set). WHY DO WE NEED FREE SCALABLE UCS FONTS? A large number of free software users switched from free X11 bitmapped fonts to proprietary Microsoft TrueType fonts, as a) they used to be freely downloaded from Microsoft Typography page , b) they contain a decent subset of the ISO 10646 UCS (Universal Character Set), c) they are high-quality, well hinted scalable TrueType fonts, and d) Freetype , a free, high quality TrueType font renderer been integrated into the latest release of XFree86, the free X11 server. Building a dependence on non-free software, even a niche one like fonts, is dangerous. Microsoft TrueType core fonts are not free, they are just costless. For now, at least. Citing the TrueType core fonts for the Web FAQ : "You may only redistribute the fonts in their original form (.exe or .sit.hqx) and with their original file name from your Web site or intranet site. You must not supply the fonts, or any derivative fonts based on them, in any form that adds value to commercial products, such as CD-ROM or disk based multimedia programs, application software or utilities." As of August 2002, however, the fonts are not anymore available from the Microsoft Web site, which makes the situation clearer. Aren't there any free high-quality scalable fonts? Yes, there are. The Bitstream Vera fonts were made public, and are now maintained as the DejaVu fonts family. URW++, a German digital type foundry, released their own version of the 35 PostScript Type 1 core fonts under GPL as their donation to the Ghostscript project . The Wadalab Kanji committee has produced Type 1 font files with thousands of filigree Japanese glyphs . Yannis Haralambous has drawn beautiful glyphs for the Omega typesetting system . And so on. Scattered around the Internet there are numerous other free resources for other national scripts, many of them aiming to be a suitable match for Latin fonts like Times or Helvetica. WHAT DO WE PLAN TO ACHIEVE, AND HOW? Our aim is to collect available resources, fill in the missing pieces, and provide a set of free high-quality scalable (OpenType) UCS fonts, released under GNU General Public License. Free UCS scalable fonts will cover the following character sets * ISO 8859 parts 1-15 * CEN MES-3 European Unicode Subset http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/cwa13873.pdf * IBM/Microsoft code pages 437, 850, 852, 1250, 1252 and more * Microsoft/Adobe Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4) http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/WGL4.htm * KOI8-R and KOI8-RU * DEC VT100 graphics symbols * International Phonetic Alphabet * Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian, Thai and Lao alphabets, including Arabic presentation forms A/B * Japanese Katakana and Hiragana * mathematical symbols, including the whole TeX repertoire of symbols * APL symbols etc. A free outline font editor, George Williams's FontForge will be used for creating new glyphs. Rogier van Dalen's TrueType/OpenType utilities http://home.kabelfoon.nl/~slam/fonts/ will be used for instructing TrueType fonts and compiling OpenType tables. DESIGN ISSUES Which font shapes should be made? As historical style terms like Renaissance or Baroque letterforms cannot be applied beyond Latin/Cyrillic/Greek scripts to any greater extent than Kufi or Nashki can be applied beyond Arabic script, a smaller subset of styles will be made: one monospaced - FreeMono - and two proportional (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with modulated - FreeSerif) will be made at the start. These minimal style requirements allow the typefaces to preserve the same characteristic spirit regardless of the scripts, so that the font will be a harmonic unity. Some design notes on individual typefaces are available. In the beginning, however, we don't believe that TrueType hinting will be good enough to compete with either the hand-crafted bitmapped fonts at small sizes, or with commercial TrueType fonts. LICENSING Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA. As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version. WHAT DO THE FILE SUFFIXES MEAN? The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format. Please use these if you plan to modify the font files. FontForge can export these to mostly any existing font file format. TrueType fonts for immediate consumption are the files with the .ttf (TrueType Font) suffix. You can use them directly, e.g. with the X font server. The files with .ps (PostScript) suffix are not font files at all - they are merely PostScript files with glyph tables, which can be used for overview, which glyphs are contained in which font file. You may have noticed the lack of PostScript Type 1 (.pfa/.pfb) font files. Type 1 format does not support large (> 256) encoding vectors, so they can not be used with ISO 10646 encoding. If your printer supports it, you can use Type 0 format, though. Please use FontForge for conversion to Type 0. Primoz Peterlin, update by Steve White Free UCS scalable fonts: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/ $Id: README,v 1.4 2008/02/11 20:06:16 Stevan_White Exp $