Open-source Unicode typefaces

A few projects exist to provide free and open-source Unicode typefaces, i.e. Unicode typefaces which are open-source 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

Main article: 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

Main article: Free UCS Outline Fonts

The Free UCS Outline Fonts ^[1] (also known as freefont) is a font collection project. The project was started by Primož Peterlin and is currently administered by Steve White. The aim of this project has been to produce a package of fonts by collecting existing free fonts and special donations, to support as many Unicode characters as possible. The font family is released as GNU FreeFont under the GNU General Public License. It also supports 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 most recent release is from October 2010.

SIL fonts

SIL International offers a large number of fonts, editors, translation and book production systems^[2] 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 and Gentium.

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.^[3]

IndUni fonts

The IndUni fonts is a GPL-licensed font family with many accents and combining characters, especially suitable for Indic, Indian and Nepali, (Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi) and Middle Eastern languages and Urdu in transliteration. It also includes characters for Avestan and for the Pinyin representation of Chinese, a set of Cyrillic characters and a basic set of Greek letters. The fonts implement almost the whole of the Multilingual European Subset 1 of Unicode. Also provided are keyboard handlers for Windows and the Mac, making input very easy.

They are based on fonts designed by URW++ Design and Development Incorporated, and offer lookalikes for Courier, Helvetica, Times, Palatino, and New Century Schoolbook.^[4]

Other

• Bitstream Vera (license)
• Caslon Roman ("BSD-like" license)
• DejaVu fonts (license), a modification and wide extension of Bitstream Vera fonts
• Droid fonts (Apache license), a collection of fonts developed for Google's Android mobile phone operating system
• Fixedsys Excelsior (public domain)
• Gentium (OFL)
• Ghostscript URW ++ Type 1 fonts, a free alternatives to 35 basic PostScript fonts (GPL, AFPL, LPPL)^{[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]} - e.g. Type 1 version of Nimbus Roman No9 L, Nimbus Sans L, Nimbus Mono L, URW Bookman L, URW Gothic L and others
• (Japanese) Hanazono Minchō (permissive license). One of the few free software fonts that includes the whole CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C block, as well as many other (related) CJKV characters, such as the Kangxi Radicals and CJK Radicals Supplement blocks).
• Junicode (GPL)
• Linux Libertine (GPL, OFL)
• Liberation fonts (GPL + font exception)
• M+ Fonts (Free License, Not GPL, http://mplus-fonts.sourceforge.jp/mplus-outline-fonts/index-en.html#license)
• Old Standard A Unicode font family for classical, medieval and Slavic studies (GPL, OFL)

See also

Free software portal

• List of typefaces
• Unicode fonts
• List of CJK fonts

References

1. ^ Free UCS Outline Fonts
2. ^ NRSI: Computers and Writing Systems
3. ^ Details for MPH 2B Damase
4. ^ IndUni fonts, by John Smith
5. ^ "Ghostscript SVN - URW fonts". http://code.google.com/p/ghostscript/source/browse/#svn/trunk/urw-fonts. Retrieved 2010-04-21. 
6. ^ "Debian package - gsfonts". http://packages.debian.org/sid/gsfonts. Retrieved 2010-04-21. 
7. ^ "Fonts and font facilities supplied with Ghostscript". http://www.ghostscript.com/doc/current/Fonts.htm. Retrieved 2010-04-21. 
8. ^ URW++ making original 35 fonts available under LPPL, http://www.tug.org/fonts/lppl-urw.txt, retrieved 2010-05-06 
9. ^ Finally! Good-quality free (GPL) basic-35 PostScript Type 1 fonts., archived from the original on 2002-10-23, http://web.archive.org/web/20021023155414/http://www.geocrawler.com/archives/3/378/1996/5/0/2064811/, retrieved 2010-05-06 
10. ^ (TXT) Finally! Good-quality free (GPL) basic-35 PostScript Type 1 fonts., http://www.tug.org/fonts/deutsch-urw.txt, retrieved 2010-05-06 
11. ^ "Fonts and TeX". 2009-12-19. http://www.tug.org/fonts/. Retrieved 2010-05-06. 
12. ^ (PDF) Five years after: Report on international TEX font projects, 2007, http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb29-1/tb91ludwichowski-fonts.pdf, retrieved 2010-05-06 

External links

• Google Font Directory
• Unicode Font Guide For Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems, a huge index of high quality free fonts
• SIL's freeware fonts, editors and documentation
• GNU Unifont
• Unicode FAQ for UNIX systems
• Unicode fonts and tools for X11
• Free Font Compilation made from the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. The fonts can be downloaded individually or as a complete package ready with installers for Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows