Misc-Fixed ISO 10646-1 Outline Font Project

This project is aimed at producing a free software outline version of the classic bitmapped misc-fixed terminal fonts, with the same coverage as Markus G. Kuhn's extended ISO 10646-1 version of the screen fonts. The main purpose is to be able to print all characters displayed on screen using one single font.

Downloading

The current version of the font is 0.3. You can choose between downloading the entire sources and build the font yourself or only a package containing the precompiled font:

• Complete sources
• Precompiled font package

Available formats

The font is currently available in PostScript Type 1 format (.pfa & .afm files distributed). Support for TrueType is planned but not implemented. For PostScript the CID-keyed font format seems appropriate to handle large character sets such as ISO 10646-1 or Unicode, but the general support is limited to Level 3 devices, and is not yet implemented in this project.

Coverage

Present coverage includes ISO Latin1, plain greek, plain cyrillic (contemporary russian alphabet) plus the Euro currency symbol, which makes approximately 300 glyphs. The designed glyphs correspond to the following Unicode codepoints:

• U+0020 - U+007E, U+00A0 - U+00FF
• U+0391 - U+03A1, U+03A3 - U+03A9, U+03B1 - U+03C9
• U+0401, U+0410 - U+044F, U+0451
• U+20AC

The planned coverage is about 3300 glyphs, the same as the bitmapped ISO 10646-1 version. The planned path for the thus remaining 3000 glyphs is:

1. mathematical operators and symbols
2. precomposed charcters with diacritics for LGC
3. other scripts
4. other symbols

Licensing and Copyright

The font sources and font files are licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), the auxilliary programs used to build the font files from sources distributed in the complete source package are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Copyright is held by the authors of the code. This means that it is free software and the usual disclaimer apply:

    This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
    modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
    License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
    version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

    This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
    Lesser General Public License for more details.

and

    This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

respectively.

Contributing

The are several ways by which you can contribute to the project:

• Install and test the font ("proofreading") and send back comments to me: which glyphs need changing, which should be implemented faster than the plan given above?
• Contribute glyph designs: sketches or glyph source code. Note that the designs must be licensed under LGPL ("copylefted") to be considered for inclusion in the font: you will retain copyright on your work, but you release the work as free software (see LGPL). If you want to develop glyph source code you will need a text editor and Ghostscript.

Contact Address

Send bug reports and contributions to Ulf Jordan.

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