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Ahoi

Paul Rädle's great jump page for foreign fonts and phonetic fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Alec McAllister
[University of Leeds]

[More]  ⦿

Alphabet Street

Expired site, run by Luistxo Fernandez&Marije Manterola. Quote from that site: "These pages are about the scripts and alphabets of the world's languages, special characters and diacritics, and transliteration schemes." [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ancient Scripts of the World

Lists and explanations of all ancient languages and scripts. No fonts. Page by Lawrence K. Lo. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Archaeological Fonts (by Bonneville Electronics)

The was a commercial site located in West Clinton, Utah, that was run by Scott T. Smith from Clinton, Utah. It had Mayan, hieroglyphs, cuneiform, Syriac, Etruscan, old Greek, old Hebrew and archeological fonts as well as Native American dingbats. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Bitstream Cyberbit

From Bitstream's web page: "Bitstream Cyberbit is our award-winning international font. Based on one of our most popular and readable type designs (Dutch 801 BT [note: Bitstream's version of Times and Times New Roman]), it includes all the typographic characters for most of the world's major languages. Cyberbit is now available! The product release includes the roman weight of Dutch 801 BT, a "serif" font. (A serif font has small finishing strokes at the end of the main stems, arms, and tails of characters, while a sanserif font does not.) The font is in TrueType format for Windows 95 and Windows NT. Future releases will provide support for "sanserif" typefaces, other platforms, other font formats, and even more languages. Bitstream Cyberbit is a work in progress. Bitstream is now distributing the roman weight of Cyberbit, free of charge, over the Internet! Remember, this release is in TrueType format for Windows 95 and Windows NT". --- Well, Bitstream no longer offers the font. It is still out there however. Try here, here, here, or here. Has these unicode ranges: Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, Spacing Modifier Letters, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew Extended (A and B blocks combined), Thai, Latin Extended Additional, General Punctuation, Currency Symbols, Letterlike Symbols, Number Forms, Arrows, Mathematical Operators, Miscellaneous Technical, Box Drawing, Block Elements, Geometric Shapes, Miscellaneous Dingbats, Alphabetic Presentation Forms, Combining Diacritical Marks, Enclosed Alphanumerics, Arabic, Arabic Presentation Forms-A and -B, CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) Symbols and Punctuation, Hiragana, Katakana, Bopomofo, Hangul Compatibility Jamo, Enclosed CJK Letters and Months, CJK Compatibility, Hangul, CJK Unified Ideographs, CJK Compatibility Ideographs, CJK Compatibility Forms, Small Form Variants, and Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Body-G katakana font site

Commercial site with interesting katakana font family. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Boudewijn Rempt
[Constructed Languages]

[More]  ⦿

Brown University Language Research Center

Links for fonts and computing in many languages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

CALL

CALL: Center for the Advancement of Language Learning's Foreign Language Learning Resources. Has links for most languages, leading in turn to font files. [Google] [More]  ⦿

CheapProfonts
[Roger S. Nelsson]

Started in 2008, this web place by Norwegian entrepreneur Roger S. Nelsson (based in Honningsvåg, Norway) sells fonts by Ray Larabie, Brian Kent, Nick Curtis, Derek Vogelpohl and Kevin King that were originally freeware fonts. Nelsson reworked them (more glyphs, more multilingual) and asks about 10 dollars per font now. He says his fonts now cover these Latin languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Belarusian (Lacinka), Bosnian, Breton, Catalan, Chamorro, Chichewa, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Filipino (Tagalog), Finnish, French, Frisian, Galican, German, Greenlandic, Guarani, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish (Gaelic), Italian, Kashubian, Kurdish (Kurmanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgian, Malagasy, Maltese, Maori, Northern Sotho, Norwegian, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Romanian, Saami (Inari), Saami (Lule), Saami (North), Saami (South), Scots (Gaelic), Serbian (latin), Slovak(ian), Slovene, Sorbian (Lower), Sorbian (Upper), Spanish, Swedish, Tswana, Turkish, Turkmen, Ulithian, Walloon, Welsh, Yapese.

Designer at FontStruct in 2008 of cowboy_hippie and Syndrome X (DNA-look typeface inspired by Syndrome BRK by Brian Kent). Nelsson's fonts are Classic Trash BRK Pro, Dynamic BRK Pro, Galapogos BRK Pro, Genotype BRK Pro, King Cool KC Pro (kid's hand; done with Kimberly Geswein), Lamebrain BRK Pro, Matrise Pro and Matrise Text Pro (dot matrix), Phorfeit BRK Pro, Syndrome BRK Pro, Technique BRK Pro, Vigilance BRK Pro, Grapple BRK Pro. The "BRK" refers to Brian Kent, the original free font designer.

In 2009, he added a number of fonts that were done by Nick Curtis some years before that (hence the "NF"): Boogie Nights NF Pro (art deco face), Copasetic NF Pro, Coventry Garden NF Pro, Pro, Fontleroy NF Pro, Hamburger Heaven NF Pro, Monterey Popsicle NF Pro, and Wooden Nickel NF Pro. Trypewriter Pro (2009) is based on Kevin King's Trypewriter. Helldorado Pro (2009) is a Tuscan wood type style typeface based on a font by Levente Halmos.

Designer of Isbit Pro (2012, a magnificent melting ice cube-shaped superlliptical typeface family), Familiar Pro (2011, designed with the same metric as Helvetica but "better than Arial"), Bloco Pro (2010, fat counterless face), Trump Town Pro (2009, athletic lettering slab serif), Geometric Soft Pro (2009), Geometry Script Pro (2010, upright connected script), DIN Fun Pro (2011), Infantometric Pro (2012), Foobar Pro (2012) and Cheap Pro Fonts Serif (2009).

Typefaces from 2013: Adultometric Pro (narrow monoline sans).

Dafont. Fontspace link. Fontsquirrel link.

Catalog of Nelsson's bestselling typefaces. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Chechen

A free Chechen font family called Noxchi (Monotype) used to be at Howard Berlin's site. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Chechen Republic Online

One free Chechen truetype font, Nokh-fn. [Google] [More]  ⦿

ComStar

Commercial font software site. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Constructed Languages
[Boudewijn Rempt]

Boudewijn Rempt's fonts for imaginary and not-so-imaginary languages: Afaka-Roman (from Suriname, with the help of Rob Nierse), Bugis-Makassar, DendenChancelleresca, Eqalar3 (for Pablo Flores' language Draseleq), goidel, gothic-1, Keiaans-(Kayenian), Mandeville-Hebreeuws, Meroitic-boldItalic, Mandeville-Chaldeeuws, Mandeville-Grieks, Mandeville-koptisch, Mandeville-Saracen, Nosjhe-standard (with Christophe Grandsire), hPhags-pa-(rotated), selang, selang-cursief, Ü-chan, ValdyaansKlerkenschrift, 2ValdyaansKlerkenschrift. He created Gothic after the alphabet devised by the Visigothic Bishop Wulfila (Lat. Ulfilas), 311-383 AD. [Google] [More]  ⦿

David Myriad Rosenbaum
[David Myriad's FontORama]

[More]  ⦿

David Myriad's FontORama
[David Myriad Rosenbaum]

David Myriad Rosenbaum (El Sobrante, CA) created high quality free fonts for Ugaritic (Ugaritic 3.1) and old Phoenician (Phoenician Moabite).

Fontspace link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Department of Ancient Scripture, Brigham Young University

David Howard's page. Has a Sumerian font (TrueType). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Dutch ligatures

Zip file with German and Dutch ligatures such as fb, fk, ffb, ffk, fj, ffj, and so forth. Expert page by Gert-Jan C. Lokhorst. For the Computer Modern family. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Ecritures du monde
[Michel Bottin]

Michel Bottin's pages (in French) on the world's writing systems. He spends some time on the major Unicode fonts, Bitstream Cyberbit (downloadable), Titus Unicode (by Jost Gippert), Code 2000 (by James Kass), and Ballymon RO (by M. Ronald Ogawa). There are also pages on Unicode and standardization. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Elsner&Flake

German type foundry in Hamburg established in 1986 by Veronika Elsner and Günther Flake. They offer original fonts as well as improved versions of classical fonts. There are many non-Latin fonts as well. In-house designers include Jessica Hoppe (Carpediem), Verena Gerlach (Aranea), Petra Beisse (Petras Script), Uwe Melichar, Manuela Frahm (Fritz Dittert), Ralf Borowiak, Lisa von Paczkowski, and Achaz Reuss.

Additions in 2005 include the dingbat typefaces Beautilities EF Alpha, Ornamental Rules EF, Diavolo Rules EF, Squares EF (Alpha, Beta and Gamma), Topographicals EF Alpha, Typoflorals EF Alpha, Typographicals EF Alpha, Typomix EF Alpha, Typosigns EF Alpha, Typospecs EF Alpha and Beta (which have several fists), Typostuff EF Alpha, Diavolo EF, Schablone EF, Gigant EF, Maloni EF, OCRA EF, EF Unovis (a 16-weight family inspired by Quadrat).

In the hand-printed category, let us mention Filzerhand.

Their blackletter collection includes some bastardas (Alte Schwabacher, Lucida Blackletter), some frakturs (Fraktur, Fette Fraktur EF, Justus Fraktur, NeueLutherscheFraktur, Walbaum-Fraktur), some rotundas (Weiss-Rundgotisch), and some texturas (Gotisch, Old English).

Commissioned fonts include Castrol Sans (2007).

Selected additional typefaces: Garamond Rough Pro (2018), Bluset Now Mono (2018), Newspoint (2017, based on Morris Fuller Benton's News Gothic), Meier Kapitalis (2013, a lapidary typeface based on a 1994 sketch by Hans Eduard Meier in his book Die Schriftentwicklung), Gillies Gothic EF (after William S. Gillies's 1935 original), EF Medieva, Bank Sans Caps EF, Metropolitain (1985) (after a 1905 art nouveau typeface by Fonderie Berthier).

Fonts4ever link (2008). Listing at Fontworks. Future events schedule. New fonts.

List of their fonts.

Catalog of their typefaces [large web page warning]. See also here. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

EPISTHMH

Martin Braun's language pages. Dead link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Eric Wannin
[Quartet Systems]

[More]  ⦿

Ethnologue

"The Ethnologue is a catalogue of more than 6,700 languages spoken in 228 countries. The Ethnologue Name Index lists over 39,000 language names, dialect names, and alternate names." [Google] [More]  ⦿

Evertype (was: Everson Typography)
[Michael Everson]

Michael Everson's (b. Norristown, PA, 1963) brilliant pages on Celtic and other languages and on font standards, featuring the following sub-pages:

  • CeltScript describes Michael's contributions to unicode in general and to Celtic typography in particular. He created (commercial) Celtic fonts such as Gaillimh (1989, bitmap font), Ceanannas (1993), Duibhlinn (1993, after Monotype Series 24), Everson Mono Gaelic (1995, hybrid sans), Acaill (1997, based on the Watts type, an early 19th century transitional angular form of Gaelic type; it was renamed and further developed into a unicode-compliant typeface called Dumha Goirt in 2011), Corcaigh (1997), Darmhagh Underwood (1993, a "rough" monowidth font based on the typeface used on the old Underwood manual typewriter), and Loch Garman (1999, after Baoithin, Colm Ó Lochlainn). He is working on Cluain (Gaelic modern grotesque), Cois Life (his take on the hybrid Queen Elizabeth type), Darmhagh (Underwood), Doolish (Gaelic modern round, after Biggs), Lóbháin (after Louvain), Páras (after the Paris type).
  • Everson Mono is a huge free monospaced font family started in 1994, but still being adjusted in 2010. As Michael puts it, Everson Mono is a simple, elegant, monowidth font. I designed it primarily to make glyphs available in support of all the non-Han characters in the Basic Multilingual Plane of ISO/IEC 10646-1 (BMP = Unicode, if you prefer), though I hope that users may find it a pleasant alternative to Courier and Monaco for general purposes, e-mail, and so forth. I have found it quite legible at sizes as small as 4 points. It is lighter and a bit looser than Courier.
  • Ogham fonts created by Michael Everson (and free for download): Beith-Luis-Nion, Pollach, Maigh Nuad, Craobh Ruadh, Everson Mono Ogham, Cog, Crosta. Mac and PC. This page also has TITUS Ogham by Jost Gippert, and Ragnarok Ogham by David F. Nalle from Scriptorium.
  • Inuktitut fonts designed by Everson include Allatuq (1998, hand-printed glyphs), Everson Mono Inuktitut, Jiniiva Maanaku, Naamajuttaaqqauq, Sikaagu.
  • The Sutton signwriting fingerspelling fonts created by Everson are free.
  • List of language lists.
  • Fonts for the Sami language of the Barents region.
  • Gaelic Typefaces: History and Classification.
  • Armenian encoding on the web.

Elsewhere, one can find rare Everson creations such as Musgrave (1994).

MyFonts sells these typefaces:

  • Allatuq.
  • Ceanannas.
  • Duibhlinn.
  • Timenhor.
  • Loch Garman. Everson: : Loch Garman is based on Baoithmn, designed by Viktor Hammer and Colm Ó Lochlainn; Baoithmn was based on Hammerschrift, which was related to Hammer's American Uncial -- though Loch Garman is more authentic Gaelic font than American Uncial. He continues: American Uncial sucks. It is inauthentic and it's not even attractive. It has a "dot" on the i (which it shouldn't) which makes it look like an í (which it doubly shouldn't). Hammer Uncial isn't much better. In my own view, the only one of Hammer's Uncials that I have seen that was any good was Pindar, and then only in its reworking as Baoithín (with Colm ÓÓ Lochlainn).
  • Teamhair (1993). A monowidth font based on the typeface used on the old Sears Tower Gaelic manual typewriter.
  • Teamhair Tower (1999). The rough version of Teamhair.
  • Dumha Goirt.
  • Corcaigh.
  • Doire (1993). A monowidth font based on the typeface used on the old Royal Gaelic manual typewriter.
  • Doire Royal (1999). A rough version of Doire.
  • Darmhagh Underwood.

His bio, in his own words: Michael Everson, based in Westport, Co. Mayo, is an expert in the writing systems of the world. He is active in supporting minority-language communities, especially in the fields of character standardization and internationalization. He is one of the co-authors of the Unicode Standard, and is a Contributing Editor and Irish National Representative to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2, the committee responsible for the development and maintenance of the Universal Character Set. He is a linguist, typesetter, and font designer who has contributed to the encoding in of many scripts and characters. In 2005 and 2006 his work to encode the Balinese and N'Ko scripts was supported by UNESCO's Initiative B@bel programme. Michael received the Unicode "Bulldog" Award in 2000 for his technical contributions to the development and promotion of the Unicode Standard. Active in the area of practical implementations, Michael has created locale and language information for many languages, from support for Irish and the other Celtic langauges to the minority languages of Finland. In 2003 he was commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme to prepare a report on the computer locale requirements for Afghanistan, which was endorsed by the Ministry of Communications of the Afghan Transitional Islamic Administration. He prepared a number of fonts and keyboard layouts for Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). Michael moved to Tucson, Arizona at the age of 12. He studied German, Spanish, and French for his B.A. at the University of Arizona (1985), and the History of Religions and Indo-European Linguistics for his M.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles (1988). He moved to Ireland in 1989, and was a Fulbright Scholar in the Faculty of Celtic Studies, University College Dublin (1991). In 2010, he made Timenhor, a Latin-script font whose glyphs are based on the uncial letterforms of Coptic manuscripts. Speaker at ATypI 2010 in Dublin. Speaker at ATypI 2011 in Reykjavik.

Dafont link. View Michel Everson's commercial typefaces. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

Fonts in Cyberspace

List of useful links and free fonts for Ogham, Celtic, Cuneiforem, hieroglyphs, Cyrillic, and languages in general at SIL, the Summer Institute of Linguistics. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fonts Now

DEAD LINK. This was Zapo (Mohammed Zafir) and Lili's 4000-font archive of themed and foreign language fonts. Of course, you can always play back to see what the site looked like when it was last alive, in August 2001. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fonts OLPC

A wiki on fonts for all languages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Fonts zu exotischen und archaischen Schriften

Links to fonts for various languages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

FREELANG Fuentes

Spanish language site for various non-Latin language fonts. A sampling: Afus Deg Wfus 2 (for Berber), AlKatib1 (2001, an Arabic typeface by Naseem Amjad), Albanian, Alice_0 (Lao typeface by by Ngakham Southichack), LAOMAY_5 CHAREUNSILP (Lao typeface by by Soupasith Bouahom), Arial AMU (1999, Armenian typeface by Ruben Tarumian), BaltFrutigerLight, BaltHelveticaMedium, BaltNewCenturySchoolbookMedium, BaltOptimaMedium, BaltTiffanyMedium, BaltUniversityMedium, CarloAtor (1997, Arabic family by Timm Erickson, Summer Institute of Linguistics), Caligraf-W, Ciula (1996, a Romanian typeface by Paul Hodor), Cursiv (Romanian), AnlongvillKhek, GabrialAtor (another Arab family by Timm Erickson), Gin, Greek (1993, by Peter J. Gentry&Andrew M. Fountain), HandSign (1993, Sam Wang), HFMassisShantNUnicode (1990-1994, an Armenian unicode typeface by BYTEC Computers and Massis Graphics), HONGKAD (1994, a family by Dr. Hongkad Souvannavong), IsmarBold, IsmarLight, Lakshmi, X000000A (1994, a lao typeface by Sith Bouahom), LAOMAY_2-CHAREUNSILP, Alice3Medium, Alice0Medium, Langagedessignes (1998, by Philippe and François Blondel), NorKirk (1997, a great Armenian typeface by Ruben Tarumian), NovaTempo (for Esperanto), Pazmaveb (for Armenian), ILPRumanianB100 (1996, by Charles J. Coker), Saysettha-Lao, Saysettha-LaoBold, SenzorgaAnhok, Timok, Tribuno, Turn-W, TimesUnicode, ArialAMU, PoliceTypeAPI (for Armenian), Cieszyn-Regular, PoojaNormal, Shibolet (1995, Hebrew), Shree-Ass-0552 (2000, by Modular InfoTech), Tudor-Semi-Lite, Webdunia, TimesNRCzech, TNRLiboriusVII (2001, a fully accented Times typeface by Libor Sztemon), GreatMoravia (2001 Libor Sztemon, Czechia), Johaansi-ye-Peyravi (2001, a full accent blackletter typeface by Libor Sztemon, Czechia), TimesNREuskaraEuransiEsperanto (2001, Libor Sztemon). [Google] [More]  ⦿

Gamma Productions

Outfit in San Diego, CA, which used to sell international commercial fonts in the 1990s, including Cyrillic fonts mostly from Paragraph. WL PashtoNaskh (1995) is one of their Arabic fonts. Other fonts include WLGreekTimesAncient-Regular for Greek and WL-ArabicNaskh for Arabic. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Geyinzi

Simon Ager invented this curly script in 1998 as an alternative way to write Mandarin Chinese. Since then it has gone through many revisions and refinements. The sound system is based on bopomofo (the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet) with some modifications. The shapes of the letters were inspired partly by bopomofo and partly by such alphabets as Thai and Burmese. The numerals are based, very loosely, on Burmese numerals. [Google] [More]  ⦿

Global fontware

Global fontware, or "Nongnu.org", is a site run by Primoz Peterlin. It has links to free high quality fonts for many languages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

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. [Google] [More]  ⦿

  • gnu.org

    Chinese truetype fonts. And 20 MB worth of international bitmap fonts. The fonts at the latter link contain PCF and BDF sources, and some truetype and type 1 fonts. Among the bitmap (BDF) fonts: ISO8859 series 1 through 9 (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic), KOI8 (Cyrillic), Indic, Lao, Tibetan, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Ethiopic, Arabic, IPA, Hebrew. Truetype: Latin-X fonts, Vietnamese (VISCII roman). Type 1: Latin-X fonts, Vietnamese (VISCII roman), Thai (TIS620), Thai National Font. The readme goes: "We greatly appreciate the contribution of Yannis Haralambous and Tereza Tranaka. They made free TrueType and Type1 fonts for Latin-X series, Thai, and Vietnamese. They will eventually make fonts for more character sets." The fonts are called OmegaSerif, and were made in 1999. Also included is the Thai National font Nf3, made by Yannis Haralambous and Virach Sornlertlamvanich in 1999. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Graphite

    From the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), an extensible rendering engine for complex writing systems. That is, an environment for portable smart font rendering, ideal for many non-roman writing systems. Free open source code. Graphite consists of a rule-based programming language--Graphite Description Language (GDL)--that can be used to describe the behavior of a writing system, a compiler for that language, and a rendering engine that can serve as the back end of a text processing application. Graphite renders TrueType fonts that have been extended by means of compiling a GDL program. Greg Lyons from SIL states "You might find the design to be an interesting alternative to OpenType/Uniscribe and AAT (TrueType GX)." Sourcefrge project. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    J. Victor Gaultney

    Type designer (b. Minneapolis, MN, 1962) at SIL International, UK since 1991, and an ex-M.A. student in type design at the University of Reading. He has worked on non-Latin typefaces, as well as his own extended Latin design, Gentium (2002). [Download from places such as OFL and FreeBSD]. Gentium Plus supports a wide range of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters. It was developed between 2003 and 2014 by J. Victor Gaultney (main designer), Annie Olsen, Iska Routamaa, an Becca Hirsbrunner.

    Papers by him include Multitudinous Alphabets: The design of extended Latin typefaces (2001), The influence of pen-based letterforms on Devanagari typefaces (2001), Balancing Typeface Legibility and Economy, Gentium---A Typeface for The Nations, Problems of Diacritic Design, and "Problems of diacritic design for Latin script text typefaces" (2002). The last one is a must-read.

    Projects in which he is the main or only designer include SIL Dai Banna Fonts, SIL Tai Dam Fonts, SIL Greek Font System, SIL IPA Fonts, and SIL Encore Fonts. At ATypI 2004 in Prague, he spoke about the technical problems with East European type. In 2008, he published Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic, each in four weights, but essentially limited to Latin, and added them to the Google Font Directory link.

    At ATypI 2010 in Dublin, he spoke about sculptural letterer Arnold Flaten (1900-1976). Speaker at ATypI 2011 in Reykjavik. Speaker at ATypI 2013 in Amsterdam: Open and collaborative font design in a web fonts world. Speaker at ATypI 2017 Montreal.

    Kernest link. Klingspor link. Google Plus link. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    JL types

    All European languages supported. By DATAESTRADI Software Publishing Corp. Run by Joni-Pekka Kurronen. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    John M. Fiscella
    [Production First Software]

    [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

    Languages and Standardizations in Asian Countries

    A list of languages and standardizations for Asia. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Learning Pali

    John Bullitt's guide to Pali. Included are many links, book references, and a few fonts, such as K.R. Norman's "Norman", Alec McAllister's popular "LeedsBit PaliTranslit" font, and a discussion of Pierre Robillard's "DPalatino" and "DTimes" fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Lexicon of Sumerian Logograms

    John A. Halloran's page on Sumerian. Lots of links, including one to a Sumerian truetype font. Plus a Sumerian bibliography. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Liam Quin's Metafont Guide

    Lists all sources for metafont code for most languages in the world. Liam Quin works for SoftQuad Inc in Toronto. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Liam Quin's Metafont Guide (Dutch mirror)

    Lists all sources for metafont code for most languages in the world. Liam Quin works for SoftQuad Inc in Toronto. Site at the University of Utrechts's CS Department. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Liam Quin's Metafont Guide (mirror)

    Lists all sources for metafont code for most languages in the world. Liam Quin works for SoftQuad Inc in Toronto. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Linguist Software

    "Linguist's Software, the world's leading foreign language font foundry since 1984, produces TrueType and Type 1 fonts for over 630 languages for Windows and Macintosh computers. Our fonts may also be used, with some restrictions, in the NT, DOS, OS/2, NeXT, and UNIX operating systems. You may order directly from us. Doing so assures that you always get the latest version, automatic registration, free technical support, and upgrade notification." About 100 dollars per family. Custom fonts made at about 50 dollars per character. Run by Philip Barton Payne. Web contact: Gene Sorensen. The font licenses mention Linguist Software and Payne Loving Trust. Based in Edmonds, WA. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Mac OS text encoding

    Character encodings for Mac OS systems for most foreign languages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    MacCampus
    [Sebastian Kempgen]

    Europe's largest independent foreign language font developer for the Macintosh, which is directed by Sebastian Kempgen from Germany. Fonts include: Western Languages (CoreFont series), Eastern Europe (CE-Font series), Cyrillic (Professional series: RomanCyrillic Pro, Ladoga Pro etc. (text fonts); DEsign fonts: Faktor, Inessa Cyr etc. (headline, handwriting); Olliffe Fonts: Batumi, Schechtel, Russian Open (display type; example: Mashinka); Scientific Cyrillic (includes old orthography, accents, old characters); Old Church Slavonic (Cyrillic and Glagolitic, Square and Round); Non-Slavic Cyrillic: Roman CyrTurk, Ladoga CyrTurk), Greek (Modern Greek and Classical Greek (Agora and Parmenides)), Icelandic&Faeroese (PolarFont series), Irish&Welsh (Gaelic, Celtic in the CeltoFont series), Romanian (DacoFont series), Turkish (TurkoFont series), BalkanFont series (Hungarian, Romanian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Maltese), Basque (BaskoFont series), Saami (SamoFont series), Georgian, Armenian, Coptic (such as the Pachomius font), Cuneiform, Sabean, SinoFont series for Vietnamese plus more or Chinese (Pinyin) transliteration, phonetic Fonts (Trubetzkoy&Phonetica), Transliteration Fonts. Some of its fonts (like Campus Ten/Twelve and Magister Book) are now sold through Agfa/Monotype.

    Names of some fonts: Breitkopf Fraktur, Campus Sans, CampusRoman Pro, CampusSans Block, Dareios, Faktor, Glagol Pro, Inessa, Konkret, Kronstadt, Marib, Method, Moskva Pro, Parmenides, Polar, Retrograd, Saames, Tafelkreide, Tatlin, Thule, Trubetzkoy. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Mandrake

    Page on the internationalization of Mandrake by Pablo Saratxaga. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Match Fonts
    [Michel Bujardet]

    Match Fonts is the West Hollywood, CA-based foundry led by Michel Bujardet (b. Bordeaux, France, 1951), who is Mike Budge on alt.binaries.fonts. They make and sell interesting font paks. A particular favorite of mine is the Calligraphic Fonts Pack 2, which has the beautiful medieval-look typeface Rodolphe (2001), together with the Chancellerie family, the blackletter font SquareText, and a few Uncial fonts called Oncial. Free demos. Cursive Handwriting is a 6-font pak for teaching handwriting. Also offering a handwriting and signature font service. Among free offerings, check Le Blackmail (ransom font). Also, commercial fonts for these languages: Armenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Greek, Hawaian, International Phonetic (IPA), Hebrew, Hieroglyphs, Hungarian, Japanese, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Marshallese, Polynesian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Turkish, Ukrainian, Yiddish.

    Interesting typefaces: Boulon (letters with bolts), Bujardet Freres (French restaurant type), Calebasse (1997, semi-psychedelic), Chinoiseries (Chinese look-alike), Cristolikid (LCD), Diodes Light, Grecques, Halloween, Malabars, Metroplitain (art nouveau), Monogram, Octogone, Osselets (bones), Parador, Ruban Dis-Moi, SilBooettes, TSF et Compagnie, Venitienne, Yiddilatin, Zebrues, and the dingbats Dinosotype, Alphabetzier, Nahkt Hieroglyphics, Norman Prince (children's handwriting), Angelots, Sceaux, Seraphiques, Talismans, La Main Guided, La Main Solid (both children's tracing fonts), Bordini, Bordofixed, BoumBoum, ChapClerk, Dactylographe (nice!), Halotique (sans serif), Tortillon (2001, art deco), Normographe (great too!), Normafixed, Oloron, Parlante (serif family), Presse (typewriter), Technicien. Plus handwriting fonts Skrypta, Skryptaag (upright and connected), Willegha. a Morse Code font. The Halloween pack includes Coulures, Halloween, Osselets and SilBooettes. Fixed width fonts include Dactylographe, Oloron, Bordo, Norma. Direct access. Interview and photo. Alternate URL (in French), with many more fonts, such as the handwritten Pierre, Mariette. MICR E13 B font.

    Fontspace link. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

    Mellel

    Fonts for many languages, including Greek and Arabic. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Mesa

    "The Mesa Polyglot alphabet was invented by Juan Mesa (b. 1928), a Cuban-American living in Miami. It was designed as an easy-to-learn and simple-to-use alternative international alphabet." A Mesa font by Nicholas Fabian is included. See also here for MesaAnalogMedium (2001). [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Meta-archive of Non-Roman Fonts

    Edited by Laurel Mittenthal at Harvard: "This page provides links to websites which make non-Roman fonts available for downloading, and to those with lists of links for non-Roman fonts on the web." [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Michael Everson
    [Evertype (was: Everson Typography)]

    [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

    Michel Bottin
    [Ecritures du monde]

    [More]  ⦿

    Michel Bujardet
    [Match Fonts]

    [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

    Mon font pegus

    Free Mon font by George Aaron Broadwell. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Monotype: All languages

    Monotype sells fonts for the following languages: Amharic, Aksara Kaganga, Arabic, Armenian, Balinese, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Coptic, Devanagari (Hindi/Marathi/Nepali), Farsi, Georgian, Glagolitic, Gujerathi, Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Hebrew, Japanese, Javanese, Jawi, Kannada, Korean, Laotian, Lontarak, Malayalam, Old Bulgarian, Oriya, Pushto, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Surat Pustaha, Syriac, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Urdu, Vietnamese. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Multilingual Macintosh Resources

    Andreas Prilop's multilingual font links. Great starter site, especially for the technical fanatic. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Music of the Ancient Near East
    [Richard J. Dumbrill]

    Richard Dumbrill's page. Find a free font Akkadian-1, and a commercial family, RD-Akkadian (cuneiform signs). Plus RD-Times Scholar (commercial). Furthermore, custom font design for Syriac, Ugaritic, Hittite cuneiforms, South Arabian, Phoenician. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Nacos

    Written characters of the world: all alphabet sets shown and explained (in Japanese). [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Naxi scripts

    Simon Ager's page on Naxi scripts, Dongba and Geba. "The Naxi language (a.k.a. Nakhi, Naqxi, Nasi or Moso) is a Sino-Tibetan language, though some linguists classify it as a Burmese-Lolo language. About 250,000 people speak Naxi in the Chinese province of Yunnan, particularly around the town of Lijiang. There are also Naxi people in Sichuan, Tibet and possibly in Burma/Myanmar." About Dongba, which has about 1400 beautiful glyphs, he writes: "The Naxi Dongba (a.k.a. Tomba or dto-mba) script was reputedly invented by King Moubao Azong in the 13th century. It is used exclusively by the Dongba (shamans/priests) as an aid to the recitation of ritual texts during religious ceremonies and shamanistic rituals. The Naxi language and script was discouraged after the Communist victory in 1949 and actively suppressed during the Cultural Revolution in the 60s when thousands of manuscripts were destroyed. Today only a handful of people can read and write the dongba script, and all of them are over 70, though efforts are being made to preserve the script and a number of students are learning it. A newspaper was published during the 1980s printed in the Dongba script and the Latin alphabet in an attempt to increase the level of literacy among the Naxi people in their own language. Over 30 books were also published. There efforts were successful at first - in 1982, 200 people could read Naxi in the Latin alphabet. By 1985, 1,700 could do so. Unfortunately the Chinese government phased out Naxi language teaching in the late 80s." [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Noxchi

    Chechen Latin-based font family by Monotype. The fonts include 15 specific Chechen (Nokhchi) letters, 2 of them are dipthongs (doubled letters). See also here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    OLPC Wiki

    Wiki on fonts for languages from the poorest regions of the world. Based in part on the groundwork by Wazu in Japan and the Unicode font list of Alan Wood. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Omnifont

    Many products supporting hundreds of languages. A collection of products for language learning, translation, dictionary, OCR and fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Omniglot

    Simon Ager's fantastic pages about all possible writing systems. Grouped in alphabetic writing systems, syllabic systems, logographic systems, and others such as the ones used for fictional (constructed) languages (Braille, Morse, Geyinzi, Shavian, Mesa). [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Omniglot

    Links to foreign font sites. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Oxford University

    At Oxford's Centre for Humanities Computing Software: A well-written introduction to fonts and font installation. Links and tips for many languages. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Pango

    "The goal of the Pango project is to provide an open-source framework for the layout and rendering of internationalized text. Pango is an offshoot of the GTK+ and GNOME projects, and the initial focus is operation in those environments, however there is nothing fundamentally GTK+ or GNOME specific about Pango. Pango uses Unicode for all of its encoding, and will eventually support output in all the worlds major languages. " For X/UNIX. It uses freetype and will allow all font types when finished. Free open source software, of course. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Philip Barton Payne

    President of The Payne Loving Trust, which owns Linguist's Software (Edmonds, WA). A selection of the fonts of "Payne Loving Trust" that are floating around in cyberspace includes AradLevelVI, CityBlueprint, CountryBlueprint, EuroRoman, EuroRomanOblique, Graeca, PanRoman, Romantic, RomanticBold, RomanticItalic, SansSerif, SansSerifBold, SansSerifBoldOblique, SansSerifOblique, SuperFrench, Supergreek, TbilisiCaps, TbilisiText, TbilisiText13215, Technic, TechnicBold, TechnicLite. Apparently, Linguist's Software calls upon a battery of nameless typographers for font design. They also sell LaserIPA fonts (IPARoman, IPAKiel, IPAKielSeven and IPAExtras). [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Phoenician Alphabet
    [Salim George Khalaf]

    At NC-based Salim George Khalaf's page on ancient Phoenicia, find free truetype fonts (Mac, PC): Nakht Hieroglyphics, Eshmoon (1996; Phoenician runes by Salim himself) and Ugaritic1 (by David Myriad Rosenbaum, El Sobrante, CA). Alternate URL. It has a great tree of language genealogies, placing Phoenician around 1600BC, with as child languages Proto-Arabic (1500BC), Old Hebrew (900BC), Archaic Greek (1000BC), Etruscan/Latin (900BC) and Aramaic (800BC). Alternate URL. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Pierre Robillard's fonts

    Several years ago, the "DPalatino" and "DTimes" fonts for Pali (Mac only) were available as part of Robillard's "Tibetan on the Macintosh" font package, at a cost of about US$70 from Snow Lion Publications (PO Box 6483, Ithaca, NY 14851-6483; Tel: 800-950-0313 or 607-273-8519). No web page known. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Production First Software
    [John M. Fiscella]

    Production First Software offers edriginal, revival and historic designs and specializing in non-latin scripts including Armenian, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Thai, mathematical symbols and pi characters. It is run by John M. Fiscella in San Francisco since 1990, with most typefaces created immediately after that. John M. Fiscella designed the fonts for symbols and many of the alphabetic scripts for the unicode charts and all typefaces complky with unicode standards.

    List of typefaces: BernalPF, Blck2LineGothicPF Logo, Blck3LineGothicPF Logo, Blck4LineGothicPF Logo, CourPF, CourPF Bold, CourPF BoldOblique, CourPF Oblique, EdwardianMansePFTitling, EriePF, EuroPF-Bold, EuroPF-BoldOblique, FiftiesPopPF, GrandVictorianPFTitling, HlvPF Bold, HlvPF BoldOblique, HlvPF Medium, HlvPF Oblique, ItalianatePF, ItalianateMulticolor1PF, ItalianateMulticolor2PF, ItalianateMulticolor3PF, ItalianateSansPF, LafayettePF, LosPFBold, MisionPFAntique, MisionPFBold, MisionPFBook, MisionPFBookMetal, MisionPFLight, MisionPFTitling, PalouPFTitling, PiazzaPFScript, RadioPF, RadioCityPF, SymbolPF Bold, SymbolPF BoldItalic, SymbolPF Italic, TexMexPF, TmsPF Bold, TmsPF BoldItalic, TmsPF Cursive, TmsPF Italic, TmsPF Rom +, TmsMathPF Cursive, TmsHebWidePF Rom, UnvPF Bold, UnvPF BoldOblique, UnvPF Oblique, UnvPF Medium, UviewPF Bold, UviewPF BoldOblique, UviewPF Oblique, UviewPF Medium, ZenonPFTitling. [Google] [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

    Quartet Systems
    [Eric Wannin]

    Eric Wannin's French commercial foundry with PC and Mac fonts for all European languages, most Indic languages, Cyrillic, Vietnamese, Amharic, Inuit, Slavonic, Greek, Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Burmese, Cri. Hieroglyphic fonts too. Free font family: EuroQuartet. These fonts have one glyph only, the Euro symbol. It has some bar code fonts too.

    Multilingual fonts. They cover Braille, East European languages, Turkish, Baltic, Cyrillic, Icelandic and Greek. According to the Google] [More]  ⦿

    Richard J. Dumbrill
    [Music of the Ancient Near East]

    [More]  ⦿

    Roger S. Nelsson
    [CheapProfonts]

    [MyFonts] [More]  ⦿

    Salim George Khalaf
    [Phoenician Alphabet]

    [More]  ⦿

    Sebastian Kempgen
    [MacCampus]

    [More]  ⦿

    Signum Art

    Font work, vendor of fonts, all languages. Based in Saint-Maur, France. Run by Malcolm John and Chris Dubber. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    SIL International (or: Summer Institute of Linguistics)

    Located in Dallas, TX, est. 1934. Founded over 70 years ago, SIL International is a faith-based organization that studies, documents, and assists in developing the world's lesser-known languages. SIL's staff shares a Christian commitment to service, academic excellence, and professional engagement through literacy, linguistics, translation, and other academic disciplines. SIL makes its services available to all without regard to religious belief, political ideology, gender, race, or ethnic background. Wikipedia writes: The organization's focus on language description, language development and Bible translation, and the missionary activities carried out by many of its field workers have been criticized by linguists and anthropologists who argue that SIL aims to change indigenous cultures, which exacerbates the problems that cause language endangerment and language death.

    Fonts in Cyberspace is an archive of many multilingual fonts. SIL Fonts, free to all, and professionally put together include the following:

    • Charis SIL Font: A serif, proportionally-spaced font optimized for readability in long printed documents. Charis SIL download.
    • Doulos SIL Font: A Unicode font with a comprehensive set of characters needed for almost any Roman- or Cyrillic-based writing system (including IPA), whether for phonetic or orthographic needs.
    • Gentium: Supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode. Gentium Plus supports a wide range of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters. It was developed between 2003 and 2014 by J. Victor Gaultney (main designer), Annie Olsen, Iska Routamaa, and Becca Hirsbrunner. CTAN download link. Microsite. Open Font Library link.
    • Lateef: An extended Arabic script font for OpenType and AAT systems. See also here.
    • Nastaliq Navees: Font package for Nastaliq style of calligraphy
    • Scheherazade: An extended Arabic script font for OpenType and AAT systems. Contributors include Jonathan Kew and Bob Hallissy.
    • SIL Apparatus Fonts: Symbols used for Biblical text apparatus
    • SIL Dai Banna Fonts: Xishuangbanna Dai (New Tai Lue) fonts for Windows and Macintosh
    • SIL Encore Fonts: Library of phonetic characters and linguistic symbols. This package includes SIL Doulos (similar to Times), SIL Sophia (similar to Univers), SIL Manuscript (monospace, like Prestige), and SIL Charis (enlarged x-height). Included is Sophia Nubian (2008), which is based on an old Nubian text.
    • SIL Encore IPA Fonts: Phonetic fonts
    • SIL Font Cache Extender: This Macintosh extension increases the MacOS font cache size. It is useful when working with large fonts, such as SIL Greek, SIL Hebrew, or any GX font.
    • SIL Greek Font System (Galatia): Greek font package for Windows and Macintosh. See also here.
    • SIL Greek Unicode Font (Galatia SIL): Greek Unicode OpenType fonts
    • SIL Hebrew Font System (Ezra): Hebrew font package for Windows and Macintosh
    • SIL Hebrew Unicode Font (Ezra SIL): Hebrew Unicode OpenType fonts for Windows
    • SIL Tai Dam Fonts: Tai Dam fonts for Windows and Macintosh
    • Tai Heritage Pro (1995-2017), designed to reflect the traditional hand-written style of the Tai Viet script. Developed by Faah Baccam, Walt Agee, Victor Gaultney, Annie Olsen and Eric Hays.
    • SIL Unicode IPA Font beta: Released as Doulos SIL with a more extensive character inventory.
    • SIL Vai Fonts: The SIL Vai Fonts are regular and bold versions of the African Vai script used in Liberia
    • . In 2009, Benjamin Yang (SIL) published the free Vai Slant Unicode.
    • SIL Xishuang Banna Fonts: Xishuangbanna Dai (New Tai Lue) fonts for Windows and Macintosh
    • SIL Yi Font: Unicode-based Yi font for Windows
    • Unicode BMP Fallback SIL font (2008). Intended for debugging, this font contains a glyph for every character in the Basic Multilingual plane (including Private Use Area) of Unicode 5.1, each glyph consisting of a box enclosing the four hex digits identifying the Unicode scalar value.

    Fontspace link. Dafont link. Wikipedia page. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    SIL Yi

    The SIL Yi Font is a single Unicode font for the standardized Yi script used by a large ethnic group in southwestern China. Designed by SIL International, 7500 West Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, Texas. Yi is spoken by the Yi people (also known as Lolo) in Southern China (in Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan and Guangxi). The script is a purely syllabic script which was developed on the basis of an older, ideographic system.

    Nuosu SIL (2008) is a single Unicode font for the standardized Yi script. The script was standardized in the 1970s by the Chinese government. In the process of standardization, 820 symbols from the traditional scripts of the Liangshan region were chosen to form a syllabary. The syllable inventory of a speech variety from Xide County, Sichuan was used as the phonological basis for standardization. For the most part there is one symbol per phonologically-distinct syllable and vice-versa. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Slovo: Multilingual Unicode truetype fonts

    Web page with plenty of unicode compatible truetype fonts, collected by Christoph Singer. Included are Andale Mono, Arial, Athena Roman, Bitstream Cyberbit, Book Antiqua, Bookman Old Style, Century Gothic, Code 2000, Comic SansMS, Courier New, Garamond, Georgia, Haettenschweiler, Impact, Lucida Sans Unicode, Metropol 95, Monotype Corsiva, Tahoma, Times New Roman, Vera Humana 95, Verdana, XSerif Unicode. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Southern Software Inc. (SSi)

    In the late 1990s, SSi used to sell foreign fonts for Arabic, Urdu, Greek, Hebrew, Armenian, Baltic, Burmese, Cherokee, Cyrillic, Cree, Simplified Chinese, Ethiopian, Inuktitut, Gaelic, IPA, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Mayan. Farsi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Syriac, South Arabian, Tamil, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Ugaritic, and Vietnamese. Plus musical dingbats. Of course, they did not make a single of these fonts themselves. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Steve White
    [GNU Freefont (or: Free UCS Outline Fonts)]

    [More]  ⦿

    Stupid Homepage

    Two free fonts, Bhoochoo (katakana) and Fuuka50 (bold display). All formats. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Summer Institute of Linguistics (also: Fonts in Cyberspace)

    Sources of language fonts on the internet (about 400 font sources). Fantastic site with pointers to a vast pool of foreign language fonts and links. A must for non-roman language users. Some fonts are here. Examples:

    • Ezra SIL (2003): for Hebrew and Latin.
    • SIL Galatia (1997) and SIL Greek Trans (1997): for Greek.
    • SIL Apparatus (1998): a strange mix of glyphs.
    [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Summer Institute of Linguistics (FTP)

    Sources of language fonts on the internet (about 400 font sources). [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Suzanne E. McCarthy

    Based in Vancouver, BC, McCarthy's blog about diverse scripts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Terrapin Font Services

    British font service house: can sell you most of the commercial fonts. Sells also fonts for Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Farsi, Greek, Gujurati, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese (Katakana, Hiragana, Kanji), Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Punjabi, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh. Has barcode fonts, and is a special distributor of the Royal Mail Barcode font. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    The Human Languages Page

    Edited by Tyler Chambers: "The Human-Languages Page is a comprehensive catalog of language-related Internet resources. The over 1900 links in the HLP database have been hand-reviewed to bring you the best language links the Web has to offer." [Google] [More]  ⦿

    The Linguist List

    Edited by James Yuells, this site offers links for foreign typography and phonetic fonts. Very helpful! They also have free phonetic fonts for the Mac, a Cree font (TTF for PC), and the SIL-IPA fonts. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    The Wolf Inside

    Free Ffenoc language TrueType font by Josef Jahn. (Ffenoc is a language developed by Josef Jahn and Franz Ivancsich.) [Google] [More]  ⦿

    The world's writing systems

    This web site presents one reference glyph and basic information for each of the world's writing systems. It is the first step of the Missing Scripts Project, a long-term initiative that aims to identify writing systems that are not yet encoded in the Unicode standard.

    The Missing Scripts Project is a joint effort of Atelier National de Recherche Typographique (ANRT), Nancy, France, Institut Designlabor Gutenberg (IDG), Hochschule Mainz, Germany, and the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI), Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley, USA. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Unitype

    Global language solutions, including commercial fonts for about 60 langauges. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    UniType

    Commercial Windows XP packages sold with foreign language fonts in TrueType and PostScript, called GlobalSuite, GlobalWriter and GlobalOffice. Includes most foreign languages. For example, in the Cyrillic sphere, they have Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian plus over 50 additional Cyrillic languages such as Azeri, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Moldavian, Mongolian, Tadzhik, Tatar, Turkmen and Uzbek. And for North Indian, they have Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, and Sanskrit. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Universitätsbibliothek Bochum

    Foreign font links. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    University of Leeds
    [Alec McAllister]

    Alec McAllister's fonts in the "Leeds" family are free for non-commercial use. These include LeedsTranslit (for foreign languages), LeedsTime (Latin, Pinyin and Medieval). McAllister works at the University of Leeds Information Systems Services. Leeds Uni (2009) has 2975 characters from a large number of Unicode code charts, and was designed from scratch in the style of Times Roman. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Vipassana Research Institute

    Free Pali truetype font called VriRomanPaliDD (by ShweBontha Software, 2000). Download it also here. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Visible Speech

    [More]  ⦿

    Vistawide

    Archive of free foreign language fonts covering Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Celtic, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Old English, Farsi, Georgian, German, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong, Hungarian, Icelandic, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Latvian, Myanmar, Nepali, Persian, Polish, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu, Vietnamese and Welsh. [Google] [More]  ⦿

    Volterre-FR

    Links to language resources. [Google] [More]  ⦿