Free software Unicode fonts

Categories: Unicode | X Window System

A few projects exist to provide free software Unicode fonts, i.e. fonts which are free software 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. Modern Unicode fonts, such as OpenType, provide the same by containing multiple glyphs per character. (See also: Han unification)

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SIL fonts

SIL International offers a large number of fonts, editors, translation and book production systems 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.

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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.

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The Free UCS Outline Fonts

The Free UCS Outline Fonts ([1]) is a font collection project. The aim of this project, started by Primož Peterlin, has been to collect fonts from numerous existing free fonts and join them in one package, aiming to eventually support all Unicode characters. It also seeks to support 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 font collection was not updated for two years between 2003 and 2005, but in April 2005 a font package was eventually released.

This project is independent of the Free Software Foundation but their font collection is very often erroneously referred to as "The Free Software Foundation Fonts".

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