Open-source Unicode typefaces

src: public.lightpic.info

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 can in theory cover multiple languages by including multiple glyphs per character, though very few actually cover more than one language's forms of the unified Han characters.

Video Open-source Unicode typefaces

History

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 font is released under the GNU General Public License Version 2+ with a font embedding exception.

Fixed

The Fixed X11 public-domain core bitmap fonts have provided substantial Unicode coverage since 1997.

Maps Open-source Unicode typefaces

21st Century

2000s

Free UCS Outline Fonts

The Free UCS Outline Fonts (also known as freefont) is a font collection project. The project was started by Primo? 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 May 2012.

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. 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.

IndUni fonts

The IndUni fonts are 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.

2010s

Noto fonts

Noto is a font family designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. It is designed with the goal of achieving visual harmony (e.g., compatible heights and stroke thicknesses) across multiple languages/scripts. Commissioned by Google, the font is licensed under the SIL Open Font License. Until September 2015, the fonts were under the Apache License 2.0.

src: 2.bp.blogspot.com

Comparison

src: s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com

See also

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

src: mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net

References

src: mfglabs.github.io

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

Source of the article : Wikipedia