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Notes on Fonts

Last updates: Thu Apr 22 14:32:48 2004    Fri Nov 12 15:24:22 2004    Mon Dec 13 17:27:57 2004    Thu Mar 23 14:22:34 2017               

Here is an overview of the information that I've put together on the subject of fonts:

• Adobe Open Type FAQ list.
• more on Adobe Open Type Specification v.1.0
• Adobe Type 1 font standard glyph names
• Apple Font Tools Group: pointers to TrueType Reference Manual, documents on font quality, white papers, and Apple font tools.

  Implementors of TrueType font software in the TeX world, and at the FreeType Project, have turned up many deficiencies, errors, and omissions in the TrueType specifications. It is claimed that a Microsoft document http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OTSPEC/otff.htm#otttables describes all TrueType/OpenType table entries. There are also IBM OS/2 extensions described at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OTSPEC/os2.htm

• bibliographies on fonts, PostScript, and typesetting.
• character widths for 4874 fonts
• comp.fonts FAQ frequently asked questions document; this is a very large and important source of font information, including extensive vendor listings
• D-Type ``technology for super smooth graphics'': font engine, font rasterizer, and font server, with support for TrueType, Type 1, D-Type and multiple-master fonts, and for the Unicode character set. Available on at least Microsoft Windows, Apple MacOS, GNU/Linux on Intel x86, and Sun Solaris SPARC.
• STIX Font Project The mission of the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font project is ``the preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats. Toward this purpose, the STIX fonts will be made available, under royalty-free license, to anyone, including publishers, software developers, scientists, students, and the general public.'' From the progress meter at the STIX Web site, a total of 7817 glyphs are to be created, and just over 60% of the work was complete in early November 2002.
• Standard Type Services Framework This is a collaborative open source project to produce a new API for text and font handling in the UNIX environment.
• Unix Font Rendering FAQ This document answers frequently asked questions about bitmap fonts and X11 font rendering.
• Wotsit's font format This site contains pointers to descriptions of many different font formats. Its home page will lead to you descriptions of other, nonfont, file formats.
• fontname-1.6 (GNU font name mapping)
• Font Fusion font engine and font rendering font technology (a commercial product from a subsidiary of Bitstream), including support for compressed fonts, and Unicode fonts.
• FreeType Project: a free high-quality TrueType font renderer, together with ttfdump-0.5.5, a tool for dumping tables in TrueType fonts.

  This version has quite a number of problems, but they are now fixed: I have made a 500-line patch file (150 lines of documentation and 350 lines of diff listings) that can be applied with patch -p0 to the ttfdump-0.5.5 distribution to allow problem-free GNU-standard installation on at least a dozen major UNIX implementations from all of the major UNIX vendors. Because some Web clients corrupt whitespace in transferred files, which destroys the patch file, it is also available in uuencoded form.

• index of 20,627+ font names from 30 vendors; use this when you know the name of a font, and want to find out how, or where, to get it; see also the next two items.
• myfonts.com font lookup service
• URW++ font lookup service
• Chinese fonts: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/non-gnu/chinese-fonts-truetype/ There are four gzipped files, each about 2MB to 6MB in size: bkai00mp.ttf.gz, bsmi00lp.ttf.gz, gbsn00lp.ttf.gz, and gkai00mp.ttf.gz, together with LICENSE and README files.
• More Chinese (and Japanese and Korean) fonts: http://font.founder.com.cn/english/web/
• Donald E. Knuth's Metafont font design system and Computer Modern fonts
• Libertine Open Fonts Project [Times and Arial font look-alikes]
• Lookalike fonts List of fonts that resemble one another.
• Microsoft font tools including ttfdump.exe, a utility for dumping TrueType font tables (not to be confused with the other ttfdump program discussed above)
• multilingual editing with emacs
• Outline versus bitmap fonts in Adobe Acrobat
• PostScript Type 1 fonts
• TeX User Group fontinst home page; it includes archives of the tex-fonts and fontinst mailing lists.
• TrueTeX: TeX with TrueType fonts. This commercial TeX implementation also offers some non-commercial software, such as ttf_edit, a command-line editor for TrueType fonts, running on MS DOS, MS Windows (3.1, 95, NT), and various UNIX platforms.
• Unicode fonts
• X Window System fonts, including pointers to `code pages' (assignments of glyphs to 256-entry tables).