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GNU Freefont (or: Free UCS Outline Fonts)
[Steve White]
The GNU Freefont is continuously being updated to become a large useful Unicode monster. GNU FreeFont is a free family of scalable outline fonts, suitable for general use on computers and for desktop publishing. It is Unicode-encoded for compatability with all modern operating systems. There are serif, Sans and Mono subfamilies. Also called the "Free UCS Outline Fonts", this project is part of the larger Free Software Foundation. The original head honcho was Primoz Peterlin, the coordinator at the Institute of Biophysics of the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2008, Steve White (aka Stevan White) took over. URW++ Design&Development GmbH. URW++ donated a set of 35 core PostScript Type 1 fonts to the Ghostscript project. - Basic Latin (U+0041-U+007A)
- Latin-1 Supplement (U+00C0-U+00FF)
- Latin Extended-A (U+0100-U+017F)
- Spacing Modifier Letters (U+02B0-U+02FF)
- Mathematical Operators (U+2200-U+22FF)
- Block Elements (U+2580-U+259F)
- Dingbats (U+2700-U+27BF)
Yannis Haralambous and John Plaice. Yannis Haralambous and John Plaice are the authors of Omega typesetting system, which is an extension of TeX. Its first release, aims primarily at improving TeX's multilingual abilities. In Omega all characters and pointers into data-structures are 16-bit wide, instead of 8-bit, thereby eliminating many of the trivial limitations of TeX. Omega also allows multiple input and output character sets, and uses programmable filters to translate from one encoding to another, to perform contextual analysis, etc. Internally, Omega uses the universal 16-bit Unicode standard character set, based on ISO-10646. These improvements not only make it a lot easier for TeX users to cope with multiple or complex languages, like Arabic, Indic, Khmer, Chinese, Japanese or Korean, in one document, but will also form the basis for future developments in other areas, such as native color support and hypertext features. ... Fonts for UT1 (omlgc family) and UT2 (omah family) are under development: these fonts are in PostScript format and visually close to Times and Helvetica font families. - Latin Extended-B (U+0180-U+024F)
- IPA Extensions (U+0250-U+02AF)
- Greek (U+0370-U+03FF)
- Armenian (U+0530-U+058F)
- Hebrew (U+0590-U+05FF)
- Arabic (U+0600-U+06FF)
- Currency Symbols (U+20A0-U+20CF)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-A (U+FB50-U+FDFF)
- Arabic Presentation Forms-B (U+FE70-U+FEFF)
Yannis Haralambous and Wellcome Institute. In 1994, The Wellcome Library The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, England, commissioned Mr. Haralambous to produce a Sinhalese font for them. We have received 03/09 official notice from Robert Kiley, Head of e-Strategy for the Wellcome Library, that Yannis' font could be included in GNU FreeFont under its GNU license: Sinhala (U+0D80-U+0DFF). Young U. Ryu at the University of Texas at Dallas is the author of Txfonts, a set of mathematical symbols designed to accompany text typeset in Times or its variants. In the documentation, Young adresses the design of mathematical symbols: "The Adobe Times fonts are thicker than the CM fonts. Designing math fonts for Times based on the rule thickness of Times =,, +, /, <, etc. would result in too thick math symbols, in my opinion. In the TX fonts, these glyphs are thinner than those of original Times fonts. That is, the rule thickness of these glyphs is around 85% of that of the Times fonts, but still thicker than that of the CM fonts." Ranges: Arrows (U+2190-U+21FF), Mathematical Symbols (U+2200-U+22FF). Valek Filippov added Cyrillic glyphs and composite Latin Extended A to the whole set of the abovementioned URW set of 35 PostScript core fonts, Ranges: Latin Extended-A (U+0100-U+017F), Cyrillic (U+0400-U+04FF). Wadalab Kanji Comittee. Between April 1990 and March 1992, Wadalab Kanji Comittee put together a series of scalable font files with Japanese scripts, in four forms: Sai Micho, Chu Mincho, Cho Kaku and Saimaru. The font files were written in custom file format, while tools for conversion into Metafont and PostScript Type 1 were also supplied. The Wadalab Kanji Comittee has later been dismissed, and the resulting files can be now found on the FTP server of the Depertment of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics, Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo: Hiragana (U+3040-U+309F), Katakana (U+30A0-U+30FF). Note that some time around 2009, the hiragana and katakana ranges were deleted. Angelo Haritsis has compiled a set of Greek type 1 fonts. The glyphs from this source has been used to compose Greek glyphs in FreeSans and FreeMono. Greek (U+0370-U+03FF). Yannis Haralambous and Virach Sornlertlamvanich. In 1999, Yannis Haralambous and Virach Sornlertlamvanich made a set of glyphs covering the Thai national standard Nf3, in both upright and slanted shape. Range: Thai (U+0E00-U+0E7F). Shaheed Haque has developed a basic set of basic Bengali glyphs (without ligatures), using ISO10646 encoding. Range: Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF). Sam Stepanyan created a set of Armenian sans serif glyphs visually compatible with Helvetica or Arial. Range: Armenian (U+0530-U+058F). Mohamed Ishan has started a Thaana Unicode Project. Range: Thaana (U+0780-U+07BF). Sushant Kumar Dash has created a font in his mother tongue, Oriya: Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F). But Freefont has dropped Oriya because of the absence of font features neccessary for display of text in Oriya. Harsh Kumar has started BharatBhasha for these ranges: - Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F)
- Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF)
- Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F)
- Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF)
Prasad A. Chodavarapu created Tikkana, a Telugu font family: Telugu (U+0C00-U+0C7F). It was originally included in GNU Freefont, but supoort for Telugu was later dropped altogether from the GNU Freefont project. Frans Velthuis and Anshuman Pandey. In 1991, Frans Velthuis from the Groningen University, The Netherlands, released a Devanagari font as Metafont source, available under the terms of GNU GPL. Later, Anshuman Pandey from Washington University in Seattle, took over the maintenance of font. Fonts can be found on CTAN. This font was converted the font to Type 1 format using Peter Szabo's TeXtrace and removed some redundant control points with PfaEdit. Range: Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F). Hardip Singh Pannu. In 1991, Hardip Singh Pannu has created a free Gurmukhi TrueType font, available as regular, bold, oblique and bold oblique form. Range: Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F). Jeroen Hellingman (The Netherlands) created a set of Malayalam metafonts in 1994, and a set of Oriya metafonts in 1996. Malayalam fonts were created as uniform stroke only, while Oriya metafonts exist in both uniform and modulated stroke. From private communication: "It is my intention to release the fonts under GPL, but not all copies around have this notice on them." Metafonts can be found here and here. Ranges: Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F), Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F). Oriya was subsequently dropped from the Freefont project. Thomas Ridgeway, then at the Humanities And Arts Computing Center, Washington University, Seattle, USA, (now defunct), created a Tamil metafont in 1990. Anshuman Pandey from the same university took over the maintenance of font. Fonts can be found at CTAN and cover Tamil (U+0B80-U+0BFF). Berhanu Beyene, Prof. Dr. Manfred Kudlek, Olaf Kummer, and Jochen Metzinger from the Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science, University of Hamburg, prepared a set of Ethiopic metafonts. They also maintain the home page on the Ethiopic font project. Someone converted the fonts to Type 1 format using TeXtrace, and removed some redundant control points with PfaEdit. Range: Ethiopic (U+1200-U+137F). Maxim Iorsh. In 2002, Maxim Iorsh started the Culmus project, aiming at providing Hebrew-speaking Linux and Unix community with a basic collection of Hebrew fonts for X Windows. The fonts are visually compatible with URW++ Century Schoolbook L, URW++ Nimbus Sans L and URW++ Nimbus Mono L families, respectively. Range: Hebrew (U+0590-U+05FF). Vyacheslav Dikonov made a Braille unicode font that could be merged with the UCS fonts to fill the 2800-28FF range completely (uniform scaling is possible to adapt it to any cell size). He also contributed a free Syriac font, whose glyphs (about half of them) are borrowed from the free Carlo Ator font. Vyacheslav also filled in a few missing spots in the U+2000-U+27FF area, e.g., the box drawing section, sets of subscript and superscript digits and capital Roman numbers. Ranges: Syriac (U+0700-U+074A), Box Drawing (U+2500-U+257F), Braille (U+2800-U+28FF). Panayotis Katsaloulis helped fixing Greek accents in the Greek Extended area: (U+1F00-U+1FFF). M.S. Sridhar. M/S Cyberscape Multimedia Limited, Mumbai, developers of Akruti Software for Indian Languages (http://www.akruti.com/), have released a set of TTF fonts for nine Indian scripts (Devanagari, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Oriya, and Gurumukhi) under the GNU General Public License (GPL). You can download the fonts from the Free Software Foundation of India WWW site. Their original contributions to Freefont were - Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F)
- Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF)
- Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F)
- Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF)
- Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F)
- Tamil (U+0B80-U+0BFF)
- Telugu (U+0C00-U+0C7F)
- Kannada (U+0C80-U+0CFF)
- Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F)
Oriya, Kannada and Telugu were dropped from the GNU Freefont project. DMS Electronics, The Sri Lanka Tipitaka Project, and Noah Levitt. Noah Levitt found out that the Sinhalese fonts available on the site metta.lk are released under GNU GPL. These glyphs were later replaced by those from the LKLUG font. Finally the range was completely replaced by glyphs from the sinh TeX font, with much help and advice from Harshula Jayasuriya. Range: Sinhala (U+0D80-U+0DFF). Daniel Shurovich Chirkov. Dan Chirkov updated the FreeSerif font with the missing Cyrillic glyphs needed for conformance to Unicode 3.2. The effort is part of the Slavjanskij package for Mac OS X. range: Cyrillic (U+0400-U+04FF). Abbas Izad. Responsible for Arabic (U+0600-U+06FF), Arabic Presentation Forms-A, (U+FB50-U+FDFF), Arabic Presentation Forms-B (U+FE70-U+FEFF). Denis Jacquerye added new glyphs and corrected existing ones in the Latin Extended-B (U+0180-U+024F) and IPA Extensions (U+0250-U+02AF) ranges. K.H. Hussain and R. Chitrajan. Rachana in Malayalam means to write, to create. Rachana Akshara Vedi, a team of socially committed information technology professionals and philologists, has applied developments in computer technology and desktop publishing to resurrect the Malayalam language from the disorder, fragmentation and degeneration it had suffered since the attempt to adapt the Malayalam script for using with a regular mechanical typewriter, which took place in 1967-69. K.H. Hussein at the Kerala Forest Research Institute has released "Rachana Normal" fonts with approximately 900 glyphs required to typeset traditional Malayalam. R. Chitrajan apparently encoded the glyphs in the OpenType table. In 2008, the Malayalam ranges in FreeSerif were updated under the advise and supervision of Hiran Venugopalan of Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, to reflect the revised edition Rachana_04. Range: Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F). Solaiman Karim filled in Bengali (U+0980-U+09FF). Solaiman Karim has developed several OpenType Bangla fonts and released them under GNU GPL. Sonali Sonania and Monika Shah covered Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F) and Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF). Glyphs were drawn by Cyberscape Multimedia Ltd., #101, Mahalakshmi Mansion 21st Main 22nd "A" Cross Banashankari 2nd stage Banglore 560070, India. Converted to OTF by IndicTrans Team, Powai, Mumbai, lead by Prof. Jitendra Shah. Maintained by Monika Shah and Sonali Sonania of janabhaaratii Team, C-DAC, Mumbai. This font is released under GPL by Dr. Alka Irani and Prof Jitendra Shah, janabhaaratii Team, C-DAC, Mumabi. janabhaaratii is localisation project at C-DAC Mumbai (formerly National Centre for Software Technology); funded by TDIL, Govt. of India. Pravin Satpute, Bageshri Salvi, Rahul Bhalerao and Sandeep Shedmake added these Indic language cranges: - Devanagari (U+0900-U+097F)
- Gujarati (U+0A80-U+0AFF)
- Oriya (U+0B00-U+0B7F)
- Malayalam (U+0D00-U+0D7F)
- Tamil (U+0B80-U+0BFF)
In December 2005 the team at www.gnowledge.org released a set of two Unicode pan-Indic fonts: "Samyak" and "Samyak Sans". "Samyak" font belongs to serif style and is an original work of the team; "Samyak Sans" font belongs to sans serif style and is actually a compilation of already released Indic fonts (Gargi, Padma, Mukti, Utkal, Akruti and ThendralUni). Both fonts are based on Unicode standard. You can download the font files separately. Note that Oriya was dropped from the Freefont project. Kulbir Singh Thind added Gurmukhi (U+0A00-U+0A7F). Dr. Kulbir Singh Thind designed a set of Gurmukhi Unicode fonts, AnmolUni and AnmolUni-Bold, which are available under the terms of GNU license from the Punjabu Computing Resource Center. Gia Shervashidze added Georgian (U+10A0-U+10FF). Starting in mid-1990s, Gia Shervashidze designed many Unicode-compliant Georgian fonts: Times New Roman Georgian, Arial Georgian, Courier New Georgian. Daniel Johnson. Created by hand a Cherokee range specially for FreeFont to be "in line with the classic Cherokee typefaces used in 19th century printing", but also to fit well with ranges previously in FreeFont. Then he made Unified Canadian Syllabics in Sans, and a Cherokee and Kayah Li in Mono! And never to be outdone by himself, then did UCAS Extended and Osmanya.... What next? - Armenian (serif) (U+0530-U+058F)
- Cherokee (U+13A0-U+13FF)
- Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (U+1400-U+167F)
- UCAS Extended (U+18B0-U+18F5)
- Kayah Li (U+A900-U+A92F)
- Tifinagh (U+2D30-U+2D7F)
- Vai (U+A500-U+A62B)
- Latin Extended-D (Mayanist letters) (U+A720-U+A7FF)
- Osmanya (U+10480-U+104a7)
George Douros, the creator of several fonts focusing on ancient scripts and symbols. Many of the glyphs are created by making outlines from scanned images of ancient sources. - Aegean: Phoenecian (U+10900-U+1091F).
- Analecta: Gothic (U+10330-U+1034F)
- Musical: Byzantine (U+1D000-U+1D0FF)&Western (U+1D100-U+1D1DF)
- Unicode: many miscellaneous symbols, miscellaneous technical, supplemental symbols, and mathematical alphanumeric symbols (U+1D400-U+1D7FF), Mah Jong (U+1F000-U+1F02B), and the outline of the domino (U+1F030-U+1F093).
Steve White filled in a lot of missing characters, got some font features working, left fingerprints almost everywhere, and is responsible for these blocks: Glagolitic (U+2C00-U+2C5F), Coptic (U+2C80-U+2CFF). Pavel Skrylev is responsible for Cyrillic Extended-A (U+2DEO-U+2DFF) as well as many of the additions to Cyrillic Extended-B (U+A640-U+A65F). Mark Williamson made the MPH 2 Damase font, from which these ranges were taken: - Hanunóo (U+1720-U+173F)
- Buginese (U+1A00-U+1A1F)
- Tai Le (U+1950-U+197F)
- Ugaritic (U+10380-U+1039F)
- Old Persian (U+103A0-U+103DF)
Primoz Peterlin filled in missing glyphs here and there (e.g., Latin Extended-B and IPA Extensions ranges in the FreeMono family), and created the following UCS blocks: - Latin Extended-B (U+0180-U+024F)
- IPA Extensions (U+0250-U+02AF)
- Arrows (U+2190-U+21FF)
- Box Drawing (U+2500-U+257F)
- Block Elements (U+2580-U+259F)
- Geometrical Shapes (U+25A0-U+25FF)
Jacob Poon submitted a very thorough survey of glyph problems and other suggestions. Alexey Kryukov made the TemporaLCGUni fonts, based on the URW++ fonts, from which at one point FreeSerif Cyrillic, and some of the Greek, was drawn. He also provided valuable direction about Cyrillic and Greek typesetting. The Sinhala font project has taken the glyphs from Yannis Haralambous' Sinhala font, to produce a Unicode TrueType font, LKLUG. These glyphs were for a while included in FreeFont: Sinhala (U+0D80-U+0DFF). Fontspace link. Crosswire link for Free Monospaced, Free Serif and Free Sans. Download link.
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EXTERNAL LINKS
GNU Freefont (or: Free UCS Outline Fonts)
Fontspace page
MyFonts search
Monotype search
Fontspring search
Google search
INTERNAL LINKS
Type design in Slovenia ⦿
Monospaced fonts ⦿
Cyrillic type design ⦿
Phonetic (IPAfonts) ⦿
Typefaces and type design for Arabic ⦿
Hebrew font links ⦿
Indic language fonts ⦿
Georgian fonts ⦿
African fonts ⦿
Thai fonts ⦿
Laotian fonts ⦿
Armenian fonts ⦿
Standards/ISO/Unicode ⦿
Mathematics fonts ⦿
Type designers ⦿
Type designers ⦿
Braille typefaces ⦿
Astrological (or Zodiac) fonts ⦿
Sites with only a few free fonts ⦿
Non-Latin fonts ⦿
Bengali fonts ⦿
Dingbats (original) ⦿
Music fonts ⦿
Tamil fonts ⦿
Malayalam fonts ⦿
Kannada fonts ⦿
Gurmukhi/Punjabi fonts ⦿
Gujarati fonts ⦿
Oriya fonts ⦿
Greek/Coptic ⦿
Chess fonts ⦿
Native-American fonts ⦿
Sinhala fonts ⦿
Assyrian/Syriac fonts ⦿
Thaana fonts ⦿
Coptic typefaces ⦿
Type design in Iran ⦿
Typefaces with arrows ⦿
Open source fonts ⦿
Ugaritic ⦿
Type design in Sri Lanka ⦿
Courier and derived typefaces ⦿
Mayan typefaces ⦿
Fingerprint typefaces ⦿
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