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:
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Adobe Open Type FAQ list.
-
more on
Adobe Open Type Specification v.1.0
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Adobe Type 1 font standard glyph names
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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
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bibliographies on
fonts,
PostScript,
and
typesetting.
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character widths for 4874 fonts
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comp.fonts FAQ
frequently asked questions document; this is a very large
and important source of font information, including extensive
vendor listings
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Unix Font Rendering FAQ
This document answers frequently asked questions about
bitmap fonts and X11 font rendering.
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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.
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fontname-1.6
(GNU font name mapping)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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myfonts.com
font lookup service
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URW++
font lookup service
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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/
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Donald E. Knuth's
Metafont
font design system and
Computer Modern
fonts
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Libertine Open Fonts Project
[Times and Arial font look-alikes]
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Lookalike fonts
List of fonts that resemble one another.
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Microsoft font tools
including ttfdump.exe, a utility for dumping TrueType font
tables (not to be confused with the other ttfdump program
discussed above)
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multilingual editing with emacs
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Outline versus bitmap
fonts in Adobe Acrobat
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PostScript Type 1
fonts
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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.
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Unicode
fonts
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X Window System
fonts, including pointers to `code pages' (assignments of glyphs
to 256-entry tables).