Re: free ttf

[Nigel Kerr]

Vianney, and others who might be interested,

your message here has inspired me to bestir myself enough to release
the true type font i've compiled with this kind of need for a
well-covering true type font.  please find "lhude sing", a
34,445-glyph ttf font in a gzip'd tar file and supporting
documentation at:

    http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nigelk/lhdsng.tar.gz

the readme from the tgz file is included below.  welcome and solicit
comments and questions thereon.

cheers!
nigel kerr



2000-11-02 09:06:12, nigel kerr, address@hidden

manifest:


       2754  00readme.txt
       1971  coverage.txt
   51603147  lhudesing.ttf
      17994  license.txt


this true type font is based on the work of many, many people:

   + Roman Czyborra's Unifont was the starting point for the glyphs,
     see http://czyborra.com/unifont/ for a description of his
     project.  i've attempted to contact Roman about this font, but
     have never gotten a response.  Roman, you out there?  you rule.
     your many contributors rule as well.  please drop me a line.

     there isn't a license at Roman's site for the Unifont that i
     could find, though it is billed as a GNU font.  i assume that
     this means GPL or LGPL, which would dictate what kind of license
     this true type derivative would have.  i'd like this to have
     whatever license Roman and his Unifont contributor community
     dictate.  so, this 2000-11-02 version will have GPL (see
     ./license.txt) until i can clarify with Roman what his intentions
     are.

   + the font was composed from gylph outlines i crufted together of
     the Unifont font with Just van Rossum's most excellent FontTools
     package, which he kindly allowed me to make use of.  Just, you
     out there?  you rule.

about the font: at last compilation, it had all the glyphs that
Unifont did, which i make to be 34,445.  ./coverage.txt is take
straight from Roman's site, listing how many of what.  uncompressed it
is 51,603,147 bytes (the size has to do with the really crufty and
inefficient outlines i'm using, see below).

significant features:

   + it looks like someone went crazy with a dot matrix printer.
     since my abilities to figure out connections and inner outlines
     and such was limited at first, each dot in Roman's font linked
     with neighbors vertically into column outlines, but not
     horizontally.  it does look gross.  i'd like to improve this, and
     am open to suggestions.

     i have perl code that transforms from the unifont bitmaps to the
     FontTools outlines format, and tries to compute things for the
     rest of the ttf tables, if there is interest.

     i can envision different versions with different kinds of form
     flavours: lhude sing cuccu, lhude sing goddam, lhude sing k00k00...

   + this version isn't set up to be made a Mac ttf font: it is
     missing some tables that relate to PS.  i'd like to fix this,
     too, so that more people can use it.  this involves broadening my
     understanding of what i need to stuff in.

oy.  for this version (probably to be considered stable if buggy for a
while), i think that's it.  please send along thoughts and comments as
you desire.

cheers,
nigel kerr
address@hidden



Quoth "Vianney Lecroart" <address@hidden>:

> With office 2000, on windows, there a true type font called arialuni
> (28 megs) that contains nearly all unicode characters (including
> japanise, chinese, korean and so on).  of course, i can t give this
> font with my GPL project. is there a free ttf font like arialuni in
> the open source comunity? if not, is there another solution?
> 
> -vl