1-*-text-*-
2                          GNU FreeFont
3
4The GNU FreeFont project aims to provide a useful set of free scalable
5(i.e., OpenType) fonts covering as much as possible of the ISO 10646/Unicode
6UCS (Universal Character Set).
7
8Statement of Purpose
9--------------------
10
11The practical reason for putting glyphs together in a single font face is
12to conveniently mix symbols and characters from different writing systems,
13without having to switch fonts.
14
15Coverage
16--------
17
18FreeFont covers the following character sets
19
20* ISO 8859 parts 1-15
21* CEN MES-3 European Unicode Subset
22  http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/cwa13873.pdf
23* IBM/Microsoft code pages 437, 850, 852, 1250, 1252 and more
24* Microsoft/Adobe Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4)
25  http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/WGL4.htm
26* KOI8-R and KOI8-RU
27* DEC VT100 graphics symbols
28* International Phonetic Alphabet
29* Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian and Thai alphabets,
30  including Arabic presentation forms A/B
31* mathematical symbols, including the whole TeX repertoire of symbols
32* APL symbols
33  etc.
34
35Editing
36-------
37
38The free outline font editor, George Williams's FontForge
39<http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> is used for editing the fonts.
40
41Design Issues
42-------------
43
44Which font shapes should be made?  Historical style terms like Renaissance
45or Baroque letterforms cannot be applied beyond Latin/Cyrillic/Greek
46scripts to any greater extent than Kufi or Nashki can be applied beyond
47Arabic script; "italic" is really only meaningful for Latin letters.
48
49However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for
50contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and have some
51history with "oblique", faces.  Since the advent of the typewriter, most
52have developed a typographic style with uniform-width characters.
53
54Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two
55proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with
56modulated stroke - FreeSerif).
57
58To make text from different writing systems look good side-by-side, each
59FreeFont face is meant to contain characters of similar style and weight.
60
61Licensing
62---------
63
64Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
65modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
66by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
67(at your option) any later version.
68
69The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but
70WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
71or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License
72for more details.
73
74You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
75with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
7651 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
77
78As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and
79embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this
80font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the
81GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any
82other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public
83License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your
84version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so.  If you do not
85wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
86
87
88Files and their suffixes
89------------------------
90
91The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format.
92Please use these if you plan to modify the font files.
93
94TrueType fonts for immediate consumption are the files with the .ttf
95(TrueType Font) suffix.  These are ready to use in Xwindows based
96systems using FreeType, on Mac OS, and on older Windows systems.
97
98OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are for use in Windows Vista.
99Note that although they can be installed on Linux, but many applications
100in Linux still don't support them.
101
102
103--------------------------------------------------------------------------
104Primoz Peterlin, <primoz.peterlin@biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si>
105Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com>
106
107Free UCS scalable fonts: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
108$Id: README,v 1.6 2008/12/25 12:51:41 Stevan_White Exp $
109