Fonts

Sources of free / open source fonts:

• DejaVu fonts

• Gnu FreeFont

• Open Font Library

  • Font Squirrel - "100% free for commercial use"

  • The League of Moveable Type - I don't care for their grammar ("No more bull____.  Join the revolution."), but their fonts look good ...

• CTAN repository of fonts

  • CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) fonts:

    • Several Chinese font sets, from the Xinzhu County (Taiwan) website

    • Several Chinese font sets, hosted at Wirtschaft University in Vienna, Austria

    • UMing and UKai fonts, from freedesktop.org

    • Traditional Chinese fonts, from Wazu Japan's gallery of fonts

  • Lists of font sources from:

  • Typophile

  • Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL)

  • Google (webfonts)

  • OSTATIC

Editors, converters and other tools:

• • fontforge is a tool for creating, editing and converting font sets

  • otf2bdf is a tool to convert TrueType or Open Type fonts to BDF; you can read more on the man page

  • UPDATE:  I recently (June 1, 2011) couldn't download the file from the original location, so I found and downloaded it from the NetBSD public FTP repository of source packages. [link to otf2bdf package] [link to NetBSD repository]

    • You can convert from Unicode (1- to 4-byte) fonts to ISO 8859 (1 byte) characters by using mapping files and the "-m <mapfile>" option.  Some map files come with the tool; others can be found at the unicode.org website -- but you will need to insert two lines near the top of the file if you use these:

      • REGISTRY ISO8859

      • ENCODING <encoding number (1-16)>

  • FreeFontConverter is an online tool for converting fonts from one format (e.g. otf) to another (e.g. ttf)

Libraries:

• • ICU (International Components for Unicode) is a set of C/C++ and Java libraries that provide Unicode support.

Miscellaneous references:

• • ISO 8859

    • Wikipedia:

      • ISO 8859 (8-bit character sets):

        • ISO 8859-6 (Arabic)

      • During research on support for Romanian characters, I read up on the use of S-comma (the correct character to use) versus S-cedilla (borrowed from Turkish character set)

    • The ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup, a description of the variations of ISO 8859 (8-bit character) sets.  Includes downloads for BDF format font sets.

  • UTF-8

    • Wikipedia article on UTF-8, including a table showing the codepage layout

    • Microsoft page on UTF-8 encoding, including a table explaining the relationship between the Unicode code point value and the corresponding UTF-8 encoding of the same character

    • UTF-8 encoding tables, from Tomas Schild:

      • Arabic (isolated versions of characters)

    • Arabic presentation forms A

      • Arabic presentation forms B (isolated, initial, medial and final versions of characters)

  • Unicode

    • Wikipedia articles:

    • Unicode

    • Arabic script

    • List of CJK fonts

    • Unicode character code charts, from the Unicode Consortium

• Description of font naming convention

  • Documents about UTF-8 encoding:

  • UTF-8:  The secret of character encoding

  • The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

  • Installing fonts on Linux systems:

    • TrueType fonts with XFree86 mini-HOWTO (dated, but useful starting point)

  • Installing X fonts

  • KDE document on adding CJK support