Free UCS Outline Fonts - News: Release December 2008

Release December 2008

Item posted by Steve White <Stevan_White> on Fri 26 Dec 2008 11:01:07 PM UTC.

Another release of Gnu FreeFont, now with *kerning*, and several new ranges!

Download it at http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/freefont/
Find versions dated 20081226

See below for more details, and the release ChangeLog file for even more.

Big technical improvement
=========================

• FreeFont is now kerned!

Ranges added
============

• Cherokee      [donated by Daniel Johnson]                                    

                                                                               
[These by George Douros]                                                       

• Gothic                                                                       
• Phoenician                                                                   
• Byzantine Musical Symbols                                                    
• Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols (partly--see below)                        
• Mah Jong Tiles                                                               
• Dominoes (partly)                                                            

                                                                               

• Glagolitic    [by Darko Žubrinić]                                            

                                                                               

• Coptic        [donated by Steve White]                                       

                                                                               
Ranges adjusted                                                                
===============                                                                

• Malayalam     (Replaced with updated Rachana_04 font)                        
• Cyrillic      (Extended-B, Cyrillic Supplement)                              
• Vietnamese    (Added mark lookups)                                           
• Thai  (Filled out bold, italic styles, improved mark lookups, kerned)        
• Greek (Re-designed Upsilon, much fiddling with accents)                      
• Hebrew        (Added pointed letters)                                        
• Armenian      (Added ligatures)                                              
• Hanunóo       (Added mark lookups)                                           

                                                                               
Ranges filled out                                                              
=================                                                              
  Latin Extended Additional                                                    
  Miscellaneous Symbols                                                        
  Combining Diacritical Marks                                                  
  Currency Symbols                                                             
  Spacing Modifier Letters                                                     
  Superscripts and Subscripts                                                  
  International Phonetic Alphabet                                              
  Phonetic Extensions                                                          
  General Punctuation                                                          
  Letterlike Symbols                                                           
  Enclosed Alphanumerics                                                       
  added APL characters (but why?)                                              

Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols
=================================
  The suitability of this whole range is of arguable,
  On the other hand it is in the standard, and other characters in Unicode (e.g. in Letterlike Symbols) refer to it, and I'm personally pushing for completion of math ranges.  And George Douros has collected the glyphs, so in they go.     

  I replaced most of George's glyphs with copies of those in
  other ranges of FreeFont, and some with Young Ryu's TXFonts.
  His calligraphic, script and blackboard bold,              
  and his character naming scheme, remain.                   

More languages supported
========================
  I find Daniel's Cherokee to be the best I've seen, and I've
  downloaded most of the freely-available ones.             

  The extensions to Cyrillic should provide support for many
  living languages, including:                             

  Russian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Serbian, Belarusian, Rusyn, Bulgarian, Altay, Abkhasian, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Chuvash, Kazakh, Tatar, Uzbek, Yakut, Tajik, Kildin Sami, Mari, Khanty, Nenets, Mordvin, Komi, Enets, Moldavian, Chukchi, Itelmen, Aleut, Yupik                                                               

  There is a movement on to revive Coptic, so we'll call it live.

  I think the Thai range wasn't really functional before the mark lookups
  were added.  It has now been declared quite good by a native reader.  

Kerning
=======
  Finally realized why kerning didn't work in Linux, and wasn't
  recognized in Windows.  Fixed.                               

  But I never liked the kerning tables that came with Nimbus.
  I think they were automatically generated, but often didn't
  make sense technically (a kern of 1EM out of 1000 is invisible)
  or visually (many letters under-kerned, many badly over-kerned).

  So I made my own kerning tables for Latin and basic Cyrillic.

  It is likely that I made mistakes, or that I've generally over-done it.
  (As always, comments are welcome!)                                    

  The kerning in Latin is elaborate--maybe too elaborate.
  It was done with consideration at three different levels:

  * repairs: letters so widely spaced that words appear broken
  * evenness: even-looking white space between letters       
  * flow: letter spacing in printed text somehow flows in bulk.
  This is rather more subtle than what some automatic area-averaging might
  give (and harder to explain).  Basically, I printed out a bunch of text
  in various languages, and eyeballed it--a lot.

  Latin tables were intended to provide kerning for all European languages,
  and Turkish.  Besides English, I printed out pages of text in
    French, Spanish, and German
  and specifically kerned for pairs in these languages.
  I didn't do Vietnamese yet.

  The policy for kerning in Cyrillic went the other way:
  I resolved only to fix problems here.  The base font was already pretty
  tight--any further condensation would degrade readability.

Other technical repairs
=======================
  Misplaced or mis-numbered glyphs in
  Tamil, Gujarati, Devanagari, Hebrew Presentation Forms, Latin Extended B.

  Many glyphs in Private Use area that incorrectly had Unicode numbers.

  Lookup issues in Gurmukhi.

  Various spline issues in Tamil.

Thanks!
=======

Special thanks for the contribution by Daniel Johnson of the Cherokee range!

Thanks also for the work of Darko Žubrinić on Glagolitic!
  http://www.croatianhistory.net/etf/gl-font.html

Thanks to George Douros for his beautiful fonts!
  See "Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts"
  http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/

Thanks to the work and cooperation of Hiran Venugopalan
and Swathanthra Malayalam Computing on the Malayalam range
  http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/smc/

Thanks to the bug reporters!  Keep 'em coming!