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   1      Usage of GNU FreeFont
   2  
   3  Language scripts and faces
   4  ==========================
   5  
   6  There are three faces (serif, sans-serif, and monospace), and four styles
   7  (regular, bold, cursive/italic, and bold cursive/italic) for each face.
   8  There is one font file per face/style combination: 12 files in total.
   9  
  10  The letters for various languages, as well as specialized symbols, exist
  11  among the various font files, but they are not uniformly populated.
  12  All the fonts have complete support for Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek, as
  13  well as most of the extensions for those scripts.
  14  
  15  At this time, serif regular has by far the largest number of letters, and
  16  supports the largest number of writing scripts.  However there are writing
  17  scripts supported by the sans-serif but not by serif.
  18  
  19  For an overview of which scripts and sets of symbols are supported by
  20  which face, see the FreeFont 'coverage' web page.
  21  
  22  Font features
  23  =============
  24  
  25  FreeFont has numerous font "features" that perform alterations to the basic
  26  letters of the font, replacing them with other letters, or positioning them
  27  with respect to other letters.
  28  
  29  Many features are activated automatically, but in some environments, they
  30  present some user control.  This documents those features with user control.
  31  
  32  Language-specific features
  33  ==========================
  34  
  35  Some OpenType font features are activated only when the text is specified to
  36  be of a certain language. 
  37  
  38  This is done in HTML by enclosing the text with a tag whose 'lang' attribute
  39  is set to the appropriate ISO 632.2 language code.  In a word processor, 
  40  any block of text can be given a language setting.
  41  
  42  Latin
  43  -----
  44  Catalan    ligature improving l·l
  45  Dutch    ligatures for ij, IJ
  46  Sami    localized form for letter Eng
  47  Turkish    overrides ligatures fi ffi of Latin
  48  
  49  Cyrillic
  50  --------
  51  Ukrainian    ligature for double i-diaresis
  52  Serbian/Macedonian    localized letters be, and more in italic
  53  Bulgarian    style set for modern glyphs
  54  
  55  Hebrew
  56  ------
  57  Yiddish    raised vowels under yo
  58  
  59  Devanagari
  60  ----------
  61  Sanskrit    much larger set of ligatures
  62  
  63  Hindi, Marathi    better spacing of Western punctuation marks
  64  
  65  Indic languages
  66  ---------------
  67  
  68  The 'danda' character is encoded in Unicode only in the Devanagari range.
  69  When writing in scripts of other Indic languages, this same character is to
  70  be used.  But the shapes and line thicknesses of glyphs vary slightly from
  71  one script to another, so the same glyph for 'danda' may not fit all scripts.
  72  
  73  By specifying the language of the text, an appropriate glyph for 'danda'
  74  will be obtained.
  75  
  76  Style sets
  77  ==========
  78  
  79  These replacements are activated by specifying a "Style Set".
  80  These features are accessible only from typesetting software.
  81  
  82  Cyrillic    Bulgarian modern (ss01)
  83  
  84  Devanagari    Bombay (ss02), Calcutta (ss03), Nepali (ss04)
  85  
  86  Discretionary features
  87  ======================
  88  These features are accessible only from typesetting software.
  89  Typically the user must specifically request them.
  90  
  91  Unless otherwise noted, these are available only in FreeSerif.
  92  
  93  Ligatures and substitutions
  94  ---------------------------
  95  
  96  Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, German, Dutch
  97  
  98  Small captials
  99  --------------
 100  
 101  A limited set of specially drawn small capital letters in Latin.
 102  
 103  Superscript and subscript
 104  -------------------------
 105  
 106  Transform a limited set of characters--mostly Latin letters and numerals--
 107  to versions well-sized and positioned as superscript or subscript.
 108  
 109  Numeral styles
 110  --------------
 111  
 112  The default numerals of FreeSerif are mono-spaced and of even height.
 113  It also features proportionally-spaced numerals, and "old-style" numerals--
 114  those which vary in height and sometimes go beneath the baseline.
 115  These can be had at discretion.
 116  
 117  Diagonal fractions
 118  ------------------
 119  
 120  A limited set of diagonal fraction substitutions are available at discretion.
 121  The set is more than what is encoded in Unicode.
 122  They work with the ASCII slash or the mathematical slash U+2215.
 123  The transform a sequence "number-slash-number" to a diagonal form.
 124  
 125  Zero
 126  ----
 127  
 128  A slashed form of the numeral zero is available at discretion.
 129  Available in all faces.
 130  
 131  Alternative characters
 132  ======================
 133  
 134  FreeSerif has some listings of alternatives for specific characters.
 135  Again this is use primarily in specialized typesetting software.
 136  
 137  Greek, Latin
 138  
 139  Use in LaTeX
 140  ============
 141  It is possible to use Unicode fonts in recent LaTeX implementations, but in
 142      LuaTeX http://www.luatex.org/ and
 143      XeTeX http://tug.org/xetex/
 144  it is particularly easy to use Unicode text, and to enable font features.
 145  Recent versions of these systems use the 'fontspec' package to choose fonts
 146  and features.
 147  
 148  A very simple document might contain the lines
 149  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 150  \documentclass{ltxdockit}
 151  \usepackage{fontspec}
 152  \usepackage{xunicode}
 153  \setmainfont[]{FreeSerif}
 154  \begin{document}
 155  {\fontspec[Script=Default,Fractions={On}]{FreeSerif}
 156  1/7 3/10 7/10}
 157  
 158  x\raisebox{-0.5ex}{{\scriptsize ai}}
 159  x{\fontspec[Script=Default,VerticalPosition={Inferior}]{FreeSerif}
 160  abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+−(0123456789)} \\
 161  x\raisebox{0.85ex}{{\scriptsize ai}}
 162  x{\fontspec[Script=Default,VerticalPosition={Superior}]{FreeSerif}
 163  abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz+−(0123456789)}
 164  
 165  {\fontspec[Script=Latin]{FreeSerif}
 166  \textsc{Small Caps} }
 167  
 168  { Bсички хора се раждат свободни и равни по достойнство и права.
 169  \fontspec[Script=Cyrillic,Language=Bulgarian,Variant={1}]{FreeSerif} \selectfont
 170  Bсички хора се раждат свободни и равни по достойнство и права.  }
 171  
 172  \end{document}
 173  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 174  Here are some 'fontspec' setting-value pairs meaningful for FreeFont.
 175  
 176  Numbers: Lining OldStyle Proportional SlashedZero
 177  Fractions: On
 178  VerticalPosition: Superior Inferior
 179  Ligatures: Common Historical
 180  Letters: UppercaseSmallCaps
 181  Variant: 1 (etc. -- must be in {} picks style set.)
 182  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
 183  
 184  
 185  $Id: usage.txt,v 1.10 2011-07-16 08:38:06 Stevan_White Exp $