Fonts & rendering

This page briefly discussed types of fonts and ways to obtain fonts for diverse language needs.

Types of fonts

Broadly speaking one may divide fonts used today into the following groups:

• Unicode fonts, which are encoded with the Unicode standard (and ISO-10646), and which are intercompatible on any Unicode aware computer operating system
• Non-Unicode fonts
  • 8-bit
  • ASCII (7-bit)

Finding fonts

See the page on Unicode fonts on this site.

The following sites have information on various Unicode fonts, including many that are useful for African languages:

• Alan Wood's Unicode Resources: Unicode fonts for Windows computers http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html
• SIL Fonts for downloading http://scripts.sil.org/SILFontList
• Gallery of Unicode Fonts (Wazu Japan):
  • Arabic (including extended range) http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Arabic.html
  • Ethiopic http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Ethiopic.html
  • N'Ko http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_NKo.html
  • Tifinagh http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Tifinagh.html
• Unifont.org Unicode Font Guide for Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems http://unifont.org/fontguide/
• Freelang.com site (Arabic, Amharic; not clear which Latin ones are Unicode extended)
  • EN http://www.freelang.net/fonts/index.html
  • FR http://www.freelang.com/polices/index.html
• Arabeyes fonts (Arabic fonts): Arabeyes - http://arabeyes.org - is a meta project that is aimed at fully supporting the Arabic language in the Unix/Linux environment. It is designed to be a central location to standardize the Arabization process. Arabeyes relies on voluntary contributions by computer professionals and enthusiasts all over the world. You can download the fonts by clicking here or you can check the list of files available here.

Creating fonts

Before Unicode, character needs in Africa beyond the character sets provided for in 8-bit standards (like ISO-8859-1) were met by modifying fonts - changing certain letters. This is no longer necessary. However, it is possible to create new fonts (or recode old ones) in Unicode encoding. This part will list some (lists of) utilities for that:

• FontForge http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/
• The Freelang.com pages mentioned above offer a font creation service

Font utilities

• BabelMap (Unicode Character Map Utility) http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html
• Alan Wood's page http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_fonts.html

Recoding fonts

Re-encoding legacy fonts to Unicode with FontForge.

Other font information

• Microsoft Typography - Fonts and Products http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/

Other resources

• Bisharat A12n page, section on Fonts & keyboards http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/#font (information is somewhat dated)
• Richard Ishida's Unicode Utilities - http://rishida.net/utilities#unicodestuff
  • Unicode viewer - http://rishida.net/scripts/uniview/descn
  • Unicode converter - http://rishida.net/scripts/uniview/conversion
• TypeDrawers - discussion forum on typeface design, lettering, and typography http://typedrawers.com/

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