-*-text-*-
                          GNU FreeFont

The GNU FreeFont project aims to provide a useful set of free scalable
(i.e., OpenType) fonts covering as much as possible of the ISO 10646/Unicode
UCS (Universal Character Set).

Statement of Purpose
--------------------

The practical reason for putting glyphs together in a single font face is
to conveniently mix symbols and characters from different writing systems,
without having to switch fonts.

Coverage
--------

GNU FreeFont covers the following character ranges
* Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic, with supplements for many languages
* Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Thaana, Syriac
* Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Sinhala, Tamil,
  Malayalam, Oriya
* Thai, Tai Le, Kayah Li, Hanunóo, Buginese
* Cherokee, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
* Ethiopian, Tifinagh, Vai, Osmanya, Coptic
* Glagolitic, Gothic, Runic, Ugaritic, Old Persian, Phoenician, Old Italic
* Braille, International Phonetic Alphabet
* currency symbols, general punctuation and diacritical marks, dingbats
* mathematical symbols, including much of the TeX repertoire of symbols
* technical symbols: APL, OCR, arrows, enclosed alphanumerics
* geometrical shapes, box drawing
* musical symbols, gaming symbols, miscellaneous symbols
  etc.
For more detail see <http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/coverage.html>

Editing
-------

The free outline font editor, George Williams' FontForge
<http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/> is used for editing the fonts.

Design Issues
-------------

Which font shapes should be made?  Historical style terms like Renaissance
or Baroque letterforms cannot be applied beyond Latin/Cyrillic/Greek
scripts to any greater extent than Kufi or Nashki can be applied beyond
Arabic script; "italic" is strictly meaningful only for Latin letters, 
although many scripts such as Cyrillic have a history with "cursive" and
many others with "oblique" faces. 

However, most modern writing systems have typographic formulations for
contrasting uniform and modulated character stroke widths, and since the
advent of the typewriter, most have developed a typographic style with
uniform-width characters.

Accordingly, the GNU FreeFont family has one monospaced - FreeMono - and two
proportional faces (one with uniform stroke - FreeSans - and one with
modulated stroke - FreeSerif).

The point of having characters from different writing systems in one font
is that mixed text should look good, and so each GNU FreeFont face contains
characters of similar style and weight.

Licensing
---------

GNU FreeFont is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option)
any later version.

The fonts are distributed in the hope that they will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License
for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

* Regarding the use of built font files.

As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and
embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this
font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the
GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any
other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public
License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your
version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so.  If you do not
wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.

* Clarification of exception, regarding intended use of embedded fonts

The exception to the GNU General Public License for the GNU FreeFont
software exempts a user that embeds part or all of the GNU FreeFont software
in a document, as well as subsequent users and distributors of the document,
from complying with the GNU GPL under some circumstances.

Specifically, this exemption applies when the embedder has not modified
the GNU FreeFont software before embedding it. This is true even though
portions of the software become part of the document.

Therefore users of fonts released with this exception need not concern
themselves with the license terms to:

    Create a printable file using the fonts.
    - Publish such a file.
    - Redistribute such a file.
    - Publicly display such a file.
    - Print such a file or display it on the screen.

However anyone distributing the font software as software separately from
the document, even if the way the font software was obtained was to extract
it from a document, would have to comply with the GNU GPL.

A modified version of the GNU FreeFont software must comply with the GNU GPL.
It may optionally carry the same exception as the GNU FreeFont software
itself, and we recommend releasing modified versions that way. If it does,
then users will likewise be permitted to embed the modified version in
documents and be exempt from the GNU GPL requirements on those documents. 

Files and their suffixes
------------------------

The files with .sfd (Spline Font Database) are in FontForge's native format. 
They may be used to modify the fonts.

Generated TrueType fonts are the files with the .ttf (TrueType Font) suffix. 
These are ready to use in GNU/Linux, and on most modern computer operating
systems.

OpenType fonts (with suffix .otf) are preferred for use on GNU/Linux, Uni*,
but *not* for recent Microsoft Windows systems.
See the INSTALL file for more information.

Web Open Font Format files (with suffix .woff) are for use in Web sites.
See the webfont_guidelines.txt for further information.

Further information
-------------------

Home page of GNU FreeFont:
	http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/

More information is at the main project page of Free UCS scalable fonts:
	http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/

To report problems with GNU FreeFont, it is best to obtain a Savannah
account and post reports using that account on
	https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/
	
Public discussions about GNU FreeFont may be posted to the mailing list
	freefont-bugs@gnu.org

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some files in the package are copyright by GNU Freefont contributors, while
others are copyrighted by individuals.  See individual files for details
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original author: Primoz Peterlin
Current administrator: Steve White <stevan.white@googlemail.com>

$Id: README 3928 2018-06-03 20:39:39Z Stevan_White $
