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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 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  
  35  Editing
  36  -------
  37  
  38  The free outline font editor, George Williams's 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 really only meaningful for Latin letters. 
  48  
  49  However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for
  50  contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and have some
  51  history with "oblique", faces.  Since the advent of the typewriter, most
  52  have developed a typographic style with uniform-width characters.
  53  
  54  Accordingly, the FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two
  55  proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with
  56  modulated stroke - FreeSerif).
  57  
  58  To make text from different writing systems look good side-by-side, each
  59  FreeFont face is meant to contain characters of similar style and weight.
  60  
  61  Licensing
  62  ---------
  63  
  64  Free UCS scalable fonts is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
  65  modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
  66  by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
  67  (at your option) any later version.
  68  
  69  The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but
  70  WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
  71  or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License
  72  for more details.
  73  
  74  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
  75  with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
  76  51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
  77  
  78  As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and
  79  embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this
  80  font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the
  81  GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any
  82  other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public
  83  License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your
  84  version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so.  If you do not
  85  wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
  86  
  87  
  88  Files and their suffixes
  89  ------------------------
  90  
  91  The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format. 
  92  Please use these if you plan to modify the font files.
  93  
  94  TrueType fonts for immediate consumption are the files with the .ttf
  95  (TrueType Font) suffix.  These are ready to use in Xwindows based
  96  systems using FreeType, on Mac OS, and on older Windows systems.
  97  
  98  OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are for use in Windows Vista. 
  99  Note that although they can be installed on Linux, but many applications
 100  in Linux still don't support them.
 101  
 102  
 103  --------------------------------------------------------------------------
 104  Primoz Peterlin, <primoz.peterlin@biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si>
 105  Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com>
 106  
 107  Free UCS scalable fonts: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/
 108  $Id: README,v 1.6 2008/12/25 12:51:41 Stevan_White Exp $