Free software Unicode typefaces

A few projects exist to provide free software Unicode typefaces, i.e. Unicode typefaces which are free software and designed to contain glyphs of all Unicode characters. However there are also numerous projects aimed at providing only a certain script, such as the Arabeyes Arabic font. The advantage of targeting only some scripts with a font was that certain Unicode characters should be rendered differently depending on which language they are used in. Unicode fonts in modern formats such as OpenType provide the same by containing multiple glyphs per character. (See also: Han unification)

GNU Unifont

GNU Unifont is a bitmap-based font created by Roman Czyborra that is present in most free operating systems and windowing systems such as Linux, XFree86 or the X.Org Server. The development and maintenance of this font has been taken over by David Starner from the Debian project. The font is released under the GNU General Public License.

Free UCS Outline Fonts

The Free UCS Outline Fonts [ [http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/freefont/ Free UCS Outline Fonts] ] (also known as freefont) is a font collection project. The aim of this project, started by Primož Peterlin, has been to collect fonts from numerous existing free fonts and join them in one package, released under the GNU General Public License, aiming to eventually support all Unicode characters. It also seeks to support several font formats, including PostScript, TrueType, and OpenType. For this reason the fonts are derived from original work made in FontForge, and stored in .sfd (Spline Font Database) files. The font collection was not updated for two years between 2003 and 2005, but in April 2005 a font package was eventually released. The most recent release is from March 2008 for otf/sfd files and April 2008 for ttf.

This project is independent of the Free Software Foundation but their font collection is very often erroneously referred to as "The Free Software Foundation Fonts".

IL fonts

SIL International offers a large number of fonts, editors, translation and book production systems [ [http://scripts.sil.org/default NRSI: Computers and Writing Systems] ] as part of their goal to bridge the digital divide to minority languages. This site contains many utilities for Windows systems, including right-to-left editors, keymappers, RTF translators, and high-quality, free Unicode fonts.SIL publish their fonts under their own SIL Open Font License. Typefaces include Charis SIL, Doulos SIL, Gentium, etc.

MPH 2B Damase

Mark Williamson's MPH 2B Damase is a free font encoding many non-Latin scripts, including the Unicode 4.1 scripts in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane:
Armenian, Cherokee, Coptic, Cypriot Syllabary, Cyrillic, Deseret, Georgian, Glagolitic, Gothic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Limbu, Linear B (partial coverage), Old Italic, Old Persian cuneiform, Osmanya, Phoenician, Shavian, Syloti Nagri (no conjuncts), Tai Le (no combining tone marks), Thaana, Tifinagh, Ugaritic, and Vietnamese. [ [http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/views/View_MPH2BDamase.html Details for MPH 2B Damase] ]

Other

* Caslon Roman ("BSD-like" license)
* DejaVu fonts ( [http://www.gnome.org/fonts/#Final_Bitstream_Vera_Fonts license] )
* Fixedsys Excelsior (public domain)
* Gentium (OFL)
* Junicode (GPL)
* Linux Libertine (GPL, OFL)
* Liberation fonts (GPL + font exception)

See also

* List of typefaces
* Unicode fonts

References

External links

* [http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/ Unicode Font Guide For Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems] , a huge index of high quality free fonts
* [http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id= SIL] 's freeware fonts, editors and documentation
* [http://czyborra.com/unifont/ GNU Unifont]
* [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html Unicode FAQ] for UNIX systems
* [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html Unicode fonts and tools] for X11