Global fontware

Below you can find listed some resources, grouped per ISO 10646/Unicode character range. As some listed fonts come with a license incompatible with GPL, they have not all been used for constructing the Free UCS Scalable Fonts, but all of them may be worth checking.

Basic Latin (0000-007F)

URW++ 35 Core PostScript Fonts
The German digital typefoundry URW++ Design and Development released a commercial-quality set of 5 base PostScript fonts, expanded to include the complete 315-character Adobe PostScript 3 character set. The fonts are available under both the Aladdin Free Public License and the GNU General Public License. Their license notice explicitly allows embedding in PostScript and PDF documents. The fonts with the GNU General Public License are available with the GNU Ghostscript 6.0 or later.

Latin-1 Supplement (0080-00FF)

URW++ 35 Core PostScript Fonts
See notes on Basic Latin.

Latin Extended-A (0100-017F)

URW++ 35 Core PostScript Fonts
See notes on Basic Latin.

Latin Extended-B (0180-024F)

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
Omega is an extension of TeX developed by John Plaice and Yannis Haralambous. Its first release, aims primarily at improving TeX's multilingual abilities. In Omega all characters and pointers into data-structures are 16-bit wide, instead of 8-bit, thereby eliminating many of the trivial limitations of TeX. Omega also allows multiple input and output character sets, and uses programmable filters to translate from one encoding to another, to perform contextual analysis, etc. Internally, Omega uses the universal 16-bit Unicode standard character set, based on ISO-10646. Omega fonts are available under GNU GPL.

IPA Extensions (0250-02AF)

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
See notes on Latin Extended-B.

Spacing Modifier Letters (02B0-02FF)

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
See notes on Latin Extended-B.

Combining Diacritical Marks (0300-036F)

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
See notes on Latin Extended-B.

Greek (0370-03FF)

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
See notes on Latin Extended-B.
Greek Type 1 fonts
Angelo Haritsis created Greek versions of Times, Helvetica and Courier typefaces.

Cyrillic (0400-04FF)

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
See notes on Latin Extended-B.
Cyrillic Type 1 fonts
Using PfaEdit, Valek Filipov extended the URW++ fonts with Cyrillic glyphs.

Armenian (0530-058F)

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
See notes on Latin Extended-B.
Armenian Helvetica Type 1 font
Sam Stepanyan created an Armenian font visually compatible with Helvetica. Arial Armenian font is free for non-commercial use.

Hebrew (0590-05FF)

Culmus Project
Maxim Iorsh created a set of Hebew fonts visually compatible with New Century Schoolbook, Helvetica and Courier.
The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
See notes on Latin Extended-B.

Arabic (0600-06FF)

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
See notes on Latin Extended-B.

Syriac (0700-074F)

Project Meltho
The Syriac Computing Center (SyrCOM) of Beth Mardutho developde Project Meltho: Syriac Fonts for Windows XP[tm] and Office XP[tm].
Scholars Press
Jimmy Adair created a set of fonts for various Near-Eastern scripts while working for now defunct Scholars Press. Fonts are also available at American Academy of Religion. There are currently eight public domain fonts available for use for non-commercial purposes (e.g., publicly accessible Web sites) by anyone who would like to download them; they may also be used in printed material. Anyone who wants to use the SP fonts in a commercial electronic product (online, CD-ROM, etc.) must get permission from Jimmy Adair, the copyright holder, prior to use.
Project Ayuta: Syriac Language Support
There is a project to add Syriac language support on Sourceforge, but last I checked it, nothing was going on.

Thaana (0780-07BF)

Project Thaana : Universal Thaana Engine
Universal Thaana Engine is an effort to create a free (BSD Licensed) English to Thaana encoding engine. This engine could be used in various software projects. An alpha version of this engine has been ported to PHP.

Devanagari (0900-097F)

Akruti Indian Language Fonts
M/S Cyberscape Multimedia Limited, Mumbai, developers of Akruti Software for Indian Languages (http://www.akruti.com), have released a set of TTF fonts for nine Indian scripts (Devanagari, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Oriya, and Gurumukhi) under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Indix - Indian language support on Linux operating system
Along with support for Hindi, an OpenType Devanagari font, Raghu, was developed by by Prof. R.K.Joshi with assistance from Mr. Vinay Sayanekar. Raghu font has a copyrighted outlines, glyph set, and its name. It has been put in public domain for usage 'as is'. However the changes and/or modification in its existing outlines (for any other format) is not permitted and resold by any other designer than Prof. R.K.Joshi.
Indlinux
In preparation of an OpenType font, Guntupalli Karunakar estimates that in addition to the basic Unicode range 0900-097F, 204 more glyphs are needed for writing Hindi and Marathi using Devanagari script.
Bharatbhasha Shusha fonts
Harsh Kumar devised a phonetic Shusha system for typing Indic languages, where syllablic characters are broken up unto their consonant and vocal part. A free corresponding set of fonts covering Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Gurmukhi and Bangla is included.

Bengali (0980-09FF)

Akruti Indian Language Fonts
See notes on Devanagari.
The Free Bangla Fonts Project
Sayamindu Dasgupta started a project to develop free OpenType Bangla fonts available under GNU GPL.
Bengali font
Using PfaEdit, Shaheed R. Haque created a set of Bengali glyphs matching the ISO 10646 isolated forms of Bengali.
Bharatbhasha Shusha fonts
See notes on Devanagari.

Gurmukhi (0A00-0A7F)

Akruti Indian Language Fonts
See notes on Devanagari.
Punjabi font
Hardip Singh Pannu created a set of Gurmukfi font. The fonts are copyrighted by him, and are free for not-for-profit use.
Bharatbhasha Shusha fonts
See notes on Devanagari.

Gujarati (0A80-0AFF)

Akruti Indian Language Fonts
See notes on Devanagari.
Bharatbhasha Shusha fonts
See notes on Devanagari.

Oriya (0B00-0B7F)

Akruti Indian Language Fonts
See notes on Devanagari.
Oriya Unicode font
Sushant Kumar Dash created a set of Oriya glyphs (which, contrast to its name, are not really conforming to Unicode).

Tamil (0B80-0BFF)

Akruti Indian Language Fonts
See notes on Devanagari.
Tamil standard code for information interchange
A group of Tamil software developers, font creators, Tamil web-masters, Tamil scholars and teachers, vendors, and researchers drafted in 1997 a standard glyph set needed to render Tamil. The current version is 1.7.

Telugu (0C00-0C7F)

Akruti Indian Language Fonts
See notes on Devanagari.
Tikkana font
Prasad A. Chodavarapu developed Tikkana, a Telugu font exceeding the Unicode Telugu range with some composite glypgs.

Kannada (0C80-0CFF)

Akruti Indian Language Fonts
See notes on Devanagari.
Kannada Ganaka Parishat
Kannada Ganaka Parishat is a non-profit service organization that has been working hard towards implementation of many projects leading to unrestricted use of Kannada and easy implementation of Kannada as the medium in all types of computerisation activities.
Nudi Kannada Script Software
Nudi Kannada is a Kannada script managing software adhering to the standards prescribed by the Government of Karnataka.

Malayalam (0D00-0D7F)

Akruti Indian Language Fonts
See notes on Devanagari.

Thai (0E00-0E7F)

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
See notes on Latin Extended-B.

Lao (0E80-0EFF)

Tibetan (0F00-0FBF)

Georgian (10A0-10FF)

Hangul Jamo (1100-11FF)

Ogham (1680-169F)

Runic (16A0-16F0)

Latin Extended Additional (1E00-1EFF)

Greek Extended (1F00-1FFF)

General Punctuation (2000-206F)

Superscripts and Subscripts (2070-209F)

Currency Symbols (20A0-20CF)

Combining Marks for Symbols (20D0-20FF)

Letterlike Symbols (2100-214F)

Number Forms (2150-218F)

Arrows (2190-21FF)

TX Fonts
Professor Young U. Ryu from Department of Mathematics, University of Texas at Dallas, created a set of mathematical symbols visually compatible with Times.

Mathematical Operators (2200-22FF)

TX Fonts
Professor Young U. Ryu from Department of Mathematics, University of Texas at Dallas, created a set of mathematical symbols visually compatible with Times.

Miscellaneous Technical (2300-23FF)

Control Pictures (2400-243F)

Optical Character Recognition (2440-245F)

Enclosed Alphanumerics (2460-24FF)

Box Drawing (2500-257F)

Block Elements (2580-259F)

Geometric Shapes (25A0-25FF)

Miscellaneous Symbols (2600-26FF)

The Dingbat Pages
A great collection of various dingbat fonts; freeware and shareware.
Chess Fonts
A Danish chess site with chess publishing resources.
Marvosym - Martin Vogel's Symbol Font
An interesting TrueType Symbol font. Freeware.

Dingbats (2700-27BF)

URW++ 35 Core PostScript Fonts
See notes on Basic Latin.

CJK Symbols and Punctuation (3000-303F)

Hiragana (3040-309F)

Wadalab fonts
Between April 1990 and March 1992, Wadalab Kanji Comittee put together a series of scalable font files with Japanese scripts, in four forms: Sai Micho, Chu Mincho, Cho Kaku and Saimaru. The font files are written in custom file format, while tools for conversion into Metafont and PostScript Type 1 are also supplied. The Wadalab Kanji Comittee has later been dismissed, and the resulting files can be now found on the FTP server of the Depertment of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics, Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo, as well as on Ghostscript site.

Katakana (30A0-30FF)

Wadalab fonts
See notes on Hiragana.

Bopomofo (3100-312F)

Hangul Compatibility Jamo (3130-318F)

Kanbun (3190-319F)

Enclosed CJK Letters and Months (3200-32FF)

CJK Compatibility (3300-33FF)

CJK Unified Ideographs (4E00-9FFF)

Hangul Syllables (AC00-D7A3)

High Surrogates (D800-DB7F)

High Private Use Surrogates (DB80-DBFF)

Low Surrogates (DC00-DFFF)

Private Use (E000-F8FF)

CJK Compatibility Ideographs (F900-FAFF)

Alphabetic Presentation Forms (FB00-FB4F)

Arabic Presentation Forms-A (FB50-FDFF)

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
See notes on Latin Extended-B.

Combining Half Marks (FE20-FE2F)

CJK Compatibility Forms (FE30-FE4F)

Small Form Variants (FE50-FE6F)

Arabic Presentation Forms-B (FE70-FEFF)

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System
See notes on Latin Extended-B.

Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms (FF00-FFEF)

Specials (FFF0-FFFF)


Primož Peterlin, primoz.peterlin@biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si Last update: $Date: 2003/01/30 13:51:10 $