Free UCS Outline Fonts - News: New release 2010-09-19

New release 2010-09-19

Item posted by Steve White <Stevan_White> on Sun 19 Sep 2010 02:25:42 PM UTC.

A year and a half has passed since the last release.  The delay was largely my fault--you have my apologies.  A lot has happened though.  Several new ranges have been added, some of which are hard to find anywhere as free software.  Sinhala and Vietnamese should now be much more functional.  Lots of symbols have been added.  Many glyphs have been cleaned up and some more kerning has been specified, for a better overall look.

Get it at http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freefont/
Look for files dated
20100919

What follows is a summary of changes made to Gnu FreeFont since the last release.  For a more complete listing, see the Changelog.

Unicode ranges
==============

new
---

Cherokee (Daniel Johnson)
Osmanya (Daniel Johnson)
Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (Daniel Johnson)
Tifinagh (Daniel Johnson)
Armenian in Serif (Daniel Johnson)
Vai (Daniel Johnson)
Kayah Li (Daniel Johnson)
Coptic (Steve White)
Glagolitic (Steve White)

deleted
-------

Tamil from Sans (due to absence of necessary ligatures)

replaced
--------

Sinhala is now taken directly from the TeX font 'sinh' by Yannis Haralambous.
It has been reviewed and corrected by a native speaker.

altered
-------
Armenian (spacing; Aiw to reference Phi on Daniel Johnson's advice)
Vietnamese (better accent placement, esp. in Sans)
Latin (general letter form improvements and clean-ups, numeral 1 and braces in mono re-designed for distinctness)
Greek (various letter form improvements: made nu distinct from Latin v)
Cyrillic (mark placement, letter forms)
Mahjong Tiles (got rid of a bamboo shoot)
Superscripts and subscripts (standardize placement)
Georgian (added missing letter in Mono, Sans)
Western Musical Symbols (much cleaning up, correcting)
Miscellaneous Symbols (re-design of musical flat symbol)
Hebrew (corrected some vowel marks)

expanded
--------

Currency Symbols
Latin Extended-D (Mayanist letters from Daniel Johnson)
Supplemental Arrows-A (completed in Serif)
Arrows (completed in Serif, corrected some switched glyphs)
Combining Diacritics
Spacing Modifier Letters
Letterlike Symbols
Mathematical Symbols
Miscellaneous Technical Symbols
Scan Lines
Geometric Shapes (completed in Sans)
Number Forms (new vulgar fractions; completed in Serif roman)
Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols

Internatonal Phonetic Alphabet
Phonetic Extensions Supplement (completed in roman)
IPA Extensions (completed in roman bold and oblique)

Cyrillic (Abkhasian letters, yi_yi Ukrainian ligature)
Cyrillic Extended-B
Georgian (completed in Serif)

Gurmukhi    (completed Unicode range)
Gujarati    (completed Unicode range)
Devanagari  (completed Unicode range)
Tamil       (completed Unicode range)

Technical/Legal
===============
Added full GNU copyright notice to each SFD file.

Reduced cases of nested character references, to
ameliorate a bug in Mac OS 10.6

Various improvements to kerning

Removed TTF Names for sample text

TTF Names tables to give locale-specific names to the
various faces.  Checked each with a native speaker.

Added special characters for TrueType,
   .notdef .null nonmarkingreturn
Corrected the "replacement character"

Added GASP tables for control of hinting/smoothing (anti-aliasing) of TrueType.

PS Blues Values improvements; removed BlueFuzz altogether

Deleted TrueType tables 'cvt', 'fpgm', 'prep' because of FontForge complaints.

Arabic ligatures: turned on "ignore combining marks" on advice of Khaled Hosny.

tools
=====

range_report.py  has been improved a lot and expanded for Unicode 5.2

ligature_lookups.py  makes an HTML list and display of the ligatures in a font



Thanks
======

Foremost to Daniel Johnson, who drew and contributed several ranges, as well as providing technical and moral support.

To Harshula Jayasuriya for edits, advice, and other collaboration on the Sinhala range.

To Yannis Haralambous for permission to include his TeX sinha font
The Wellcome Library
Robert Kiley, Head of e-Strategy for the Wellcome Library
Thanks to Dominik Wujastyk, for providing us with feedback and contacts to repsonsible people at the Trust.

To Mina Magdy for much advice and criticism concerning the Coptic range (and for her tolerance of my choice of letter forms, which was different from hers).

To Pavel Skrylev for many additions to old Cyrillic ranges.

To Mohammed Anwari for correct ligatures in Buginese.

To Khaled Hosny for his patch for Persian.

To Karl Berry for hard work and overall sanity.

-- and to the Debian packaging team
-- and to the many bug reporters!