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   1  -*-text-*-
   2                            GNU FreeFont
   3  
   4  The 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
   6  UCS (Universal Character Set).
   7  
   8  Statement of Purpose
   9  --------------------
  10  
  11  The practical reason for putting glyphs together in a single font face is
  12  to conveniently mix symbols and characters from different writing systems,
  13  without having to switch fonts.
  14  
  15  Coverage
  16  --------
  17  
  18  FreeFont covers the following character ranges
  19  * Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic, with supplements for many languages
  20  * Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Thaana, Syriac
  21  * Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Sinhala, Tamil, Malayalam
  22  * Thai, Tai Le, Kayah Li, Hanunóo, Buginese
  23  * Cherokee, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
  24  * Ethiopian, Tifnagh, Vai, Osmanya, Coptic
  25  * Glagolitic, Gothic, Runic, Ugaritic, Old Persian, Phoenician, Old Italic
  26  * Braille, International Phonetic Alphabet
  27  * currency symbols, general punctuation and diacritical marks, dingbats
  28  * mathematical symbols, including much of the TeX repertoire of symbols
  29  * technical symbols: APL, OCR, arrows,
  30  * geometrical shapes, box drawing
  31  * musical symbols, gaming symbols, miscellaneous symbols
  32    etc.
  33  For more detail see <http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/coverage.html>
  34  
  35  Editing
  36  -------
  37  
  38  The free outline font editor, George Williams' FontForge
  39  <http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> is used for editing the fonts.
  40  
  41  Design Issues
  42  -------------
  43  
  44  Which font shapes should be made?  Historical style terms like Renaissance
  45  or Baroque letterforms cannot be applied beyond Latin/Cyrillic/Greek
  46  scripts to any greater extent than Kufi or Nashki can be applied beyond
  47  Arabic script; "italic" is strictly meaningful only for Latin letters, 
  48  although many scripts such as Cyrillic have a history with "cursive" and
  49  many others with "oblique" faces. 
  50  
  51  However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for
  52  contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and since the
  53  advent of the typewriter, most have developed a typographic style with
  54  uniform-width characters.
  55  
  56  Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two
  57  proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with
  58  modulated stroke - FreeSerif).
  59  
  60  The point of having characters from different writing systems in one font
  61  is that mixed text should look good, and so each FreeFont face contains
  62  characters of similar style and weight.
  63  
  64  Licensing
  65  ---------
  66  
  67  Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
  68  modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
  69  by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
  70  (at your option) any later version.
  71  
  72  The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but
  73  WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
  74  or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License
  75  for more details.
  76  
  77  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
  78  with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
  79  51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
  80  
  81  As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and
  82  embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this
  83  font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the
  84  GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any
  85  other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public
  86  License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your
  87  version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so.  If you do not
  88  wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
  89  
  90  Files and their suffixes
  91  ------------------------
  92  
  93  The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format. 
  94  They may be used to modify the fonts.
  95  
  96  TrueType fonts are the files with the .ttf (TrueType Font) suffix.  These
  97  are ready to use in Linux/Unix, on Apple Mac OS, and on Microsoft Windows
  98  systems.
  99  
 100  OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are preferred for use on Linux/Unix,
 101  but *not* for recent Microsoft Windows systems.
 102  See the INSTALL file for more information.
 103  
 104  Web Open Font Format files (with suffix .woff) are for use in Web sites.
 105  See the webfont_guidelines.txt for further information.
 106  
 107  Further information
 108  -------------------
 109  
 110  Home page of GNU FreeFont:
 111      http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/
 112  
 113  More information is at the main project page of Free UCS scalable fonts:
 114      http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
 115  
 116  To report problems with GNU FreeFont, it is best to obtain a Savannah
 117  account and post reports using that account on
 118      https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/
 119      
 120  Public discussions about GNU FreeFont may be posted to the mailing list
 121      freefont-bugs@gnu.org
 122  
 123  --------------------------------------------------------------------------
 124  Original author: Primoz Peterlin
 125  Current administrator: Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com>
 126  
 127  $Id: README,v 1.10 2011-06-12 07:14:12 Stevan_White Exp $