[Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of Free Scalable UCS Fonts

[primoz . peterlin]

A package was submitted to savannah.gnu.org.
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Primoz Peterlin <address@hidden> described the package as follows:
License: gpl
Other License: 
Package: Free Scalable UCS Fonts
System name: freefonts
This package wants to apply for inclusion in the GNU project

An increasing number of free software users are substituting their existing 
free X11 bitmap fonts with Microsoft TrueType fonts, since a) they can be 
downloaded at no cost from their Web site 
<http://www.microsoft.com/typography/free.htm>, b) they cover a great deal of 
international characters, c) they are high-quality and well hinted, and d) the 
FreeType project developed a good and free renderer <http://www.freetype.org/>.

Building a dependence on non-free software, even a niche one like fonts, may 
(and probably will) lead us into trouble the very moment when the above 
mentioned company is going to decide they have collected a large enough base of 
dependees which they can charge now.

There is, however, no need for using proprietary scalable fonts. URW++ GmbH has 
contributed to the Ghostscript project a collection of scalable Type 1 fonts, 
covering most of Latin ISO 8859 characters. These fonts are released under GPL. 
Throughout the net, many other resources are scattered, containing partial 
solutions for other national scripts.

I propose to start a project which aim will be producing a set of free 
high-quality scalable (Type 1 and Truetype) fonts, covering a usable part of 
ISO 10646/Unicode coded character set (including, but not limited to Latin 
Extended A/B, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Lao 
and Japanese Hiragana/Katakana alphabets), thus facilitating localization of 
free software to locales lagging behind, such as Arabic.

I plan to start with URW font collection and gradually fill in the missing 
pieces with new glyphs, as well as using matching free fonts whose authors will 
not object to their work being released under GPL. Pfaedit, 
<http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/>, a free scalable font editor will be used in 
the project.

Preliminary results are available on 
<ftp://biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si/pub/fonts/elbrus/>.