Latest revision as of 18:05, 18 October 2015

Colors may refer to:

Fonts on the XO, below, and other font considerations
General discussions about fonts and font selection
Fonts used by OLPC

Installing fonts

What fonts are already installed

A quick way to see some of the fonts available is to start the Write activity and from its Text menu click the arrow for the pop-up font menu.

In a Terminal Activity, enter the command

fc-list

for a more detailed list of fonts including variants such as bold and oblique.

To see what font the system chooses for a generic name such as "Monospace", enter the command

fc-match Monospace

Many of the fonts installed on the XO provide glyphs for other languages and so their letter forms for Western alphabets are not very interesting.

Using yum

For fonts in the yum repository that the XO is set up to use, just become root in the Terminal Activity, and enter

yum search fonts-

which will list available font packages. To install one of these packages, enter

yum install fonts-font_name

(you can leave out the .noarch extension). For example,

yum install fonts-hebrew

Note: In other repositories (such as for SuSE) font RPMs are named with a "ttf-" prefix:

yum install ttf-font_name

By copying .ttf files

If you have a .ttf font, you may be able to copy it to the XO depending on the license agreement you have for the font.

Detailed instructions to do this using a USB flash drive are at http://mathcasts.org/mtwiki/XOLaptop/Fonts

To sum up, as root in a Terminal Activity, create a directory truetype in /usr/share/fonts, and copy the .ttf file to this directory.

Note that many guides to fonts for the X Window System suggest you can install fonts in a .fonts directory in the user's home directory. This does not work for the default "olpc" user on the XO (<trac>6629</trac>), possibly because the Rainbow security framework isolates each activity.

Unicode Fonts

In order to help us out, please review the fonts on these pages (and elsewhere). For fonts not on the pages linked below, list the names of the fonts, the type of license (Free/Open Source or commercial) along with a URL pointing to the open source licence or contact information for the font owner. Please, if it is a commercial font, do not just list a company name such as Microsoft or Bitstream. We need an actual contact within the commercial organization that can issue a licence.

There is extensive information on Open Source fonts at this site. And there is an open source text editor called Yudit that can be used to write multiple scripts/languages including bidirectional support.

There is no problem with finding Unicode fonts for Western and Eastern Europe, Russian and other languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet, Greek, and Hebrew.

Arabic Alphabet

Arabic and Arabic-derived, including the following:
Kurdish
Pashto
Persian, Dari Azeri, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Uzbek
Sindhi and Parkari
Uighur
Urdu, Baluchi, Brahui, Kashmiri, Lahnda, Shahmukhi, and others

African Fonts

Ethiopic

Used to write Amharic, Bilen, Oromo, Tigré, Tigrinya, and other languages. It evolved from the script for classical Ge'ez, which is now strictly a liturgical language.

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Ethiopic.html
Abyssinica SIL Now released under the community-accepted Open Font License.

Pan-Nigerian

This uses the Latin-Extended ranges supported by Gentium, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL and DejaVu fonts. See PanAfriL10n: Unicode Fonts. (needs updating)

Indic Fonts

There are ten official writing systems in India, including Latin for English. Here are links for the other nine.

Bengali

Supported by Alphabetum, a commercial font which can be licensed from the author.

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Bengali.html

Devanagari

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Devanagari.html Used to write Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and other languages.

Gujarati

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Gujarati.html

Gurmukhi

Gurmukhi is the alphabet used to write Punjabi.

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Gurmukhi.html

Northeast Asian

Chinese

The Chinese culture has deep influence in eastern Asian world. Chinese characters are used by various countries, including China, Japan, Korean, Vietnam, etc. The Unicode group unified the characters as CJKV unihan area in the Unicode code map. Though it's not perfect and non-complete, it is currently the best solution for information exchange with Chinese characters.

Because of some historical reasons, two major systems, traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese, are used in the Chinese world. The former one is of the original Chinese characters and the later one is of partly simplified characters to ease the teaching and learning efforts.

Due to the nature of the complicated strokes for most Chinese characters, embedded bitmap fonts are widely used to optimized in low resolution or small sized display. However, with the high resolution of XO panel, stripping off this part may save ~3MB space for each type faces.

The current available free fonts are supporting both character systems. Details see Traditional_Chinese.

Arphic PL Font: used to included in major Linux distros.

Firefly Sung: Now called "ODO Font", providing both proportional and mono space fonts.

CJKUnifonts: derived from the aboves and now included in major Linux distros. A next generation, Unifonts-ng, is under developing to provide ~70 thousand glyphs.

Wen-Quan-Yi Zen-hei: wiki based development. Now in beta which provides ~36 thousand glyphs. (~12K merged from Unfont)

Japanese

Kochi fonts: used to be included in major Linux distros.

Sazanami fonts: replacement for Kochi fonts.

M+ fonts: ttf-mplus

"yum install fonts-japanese" was enough to get Japanese fonts working in Firefox

Korean

Un series Korean TrueType fonts

Southeast Asian

Burmese (Myanmar)

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Myanmar.html

Khmer (Cambodia, Kampuchea)

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Khmer.html

Lao

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Lao.html

Sinhala (Sri Lanka)

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Sinhala.html

== Headline text ==sonu--212.28.240.148 07:45, 25 May 2010 (UTC)Bold text Insert non-formatted text here

Block quote
[Italic text]Media:Example.ogg

Tagalog (Baybayin)

unicode block U=1700 The Ancient script is discussed(historically) in Philippine school system but seldom used and currently no open source fonts are available in this Unicode block.

Thai

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Thai.html

Vietnamese

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Vietnamese.html

Central Asian

Tibetan

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Tibetan.html

Supported by Tibetan Machine Uni which is available under the GNU General Public License. The Tibetan script and language is a particulary complex one. This article gives some background and guides you step by step through writing the word drup which is not nearly as simple as it seems.

More resources for the Tibetan script; Getting Started with Unicode Tibetan, Tibetan support in Pango has been available since Dec. 2004. If you use GTK+ 2.0 applications, Tibetan should work with the appropriate fonts. User:Simosx 11:10, 18 June 2006 (EDT)

Mongolian

Mongolian has been written in Cyrillic in Soviet-dominated Outer Mongolia, and in traditional Mongol script in the Chinese province once known as Inner Mongolia. Traditional Mongolian is the last of the modern scripts still remaining to be implemented in rendering engines and browsers.

Traditional Mongolian fonts
Mongolian test page by Andrew West.

Liturgical Scripts

In the cultures which use special liturgical scripts, religious instruction is an important part of the child's education. To fully support this, beyond the use of scanned books compressed into DJVU format, the OLPC would need to contain fonts for the appropriate liturgical scripts.

Coptic

The Coptic script is used by Coptic (Egyptian) Christians for religious purposes.

Syriac

The Syriac script is used to write the Aramaic language used in the Syriac Orthodox Christian Church, Chaldean Catholic Church, and the Assyrian Church of the East. Native speakers number between four hundred thousand and two million throughout the world. The members of the above churches can be found predominantly in the Middle East particularly in Iraq, Syria. Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon while others can be found in the diaspora.

You can find high quality, professionally developed Syriac fonts at the Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute and are under the Bigelow & Holmes Inc and URW++ GmbH Luxi font license.

These fonts are called the Meltho OpenType™ Syriac Fonts.

Old Church Slavonic

This script is commonly used in the Russian Orthodox church and related Orthodox churches to write the Old Church Slavonic language. Church services are spoken/sung in this language and many people read the bible in this language. Due to the fact that the Russian language has been heavily influenced by Old Church Slavonic over the centuries, most children are able to learn the language in religious studies classes without language-specific instruction.

Other Writing Systems

Armenian

Arian AMU - Free for non-commercial use.
Armenian Fonts

Georgian

http://www.travelphrases.info/gallery/Fonts_Georgian.html

Thaana

http://www.travelphrases.info/gallery/Fonts_Thaana.html

Cherokee

http://www.wazu.jp/gallery/Fonts_Cherokee.html

Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

http://www.travelphrases.info/gallery/Fonts_Canadian.html

Braille Patterns

http://www.travelphrases.info/gallery/Fonts_Braille.html
The DejaVu fonts have added Braille Patterns (U+2800-U+28FF) to Serif fonts as of ver2.18 July 1, 2007

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

freefont, gentium, and thryomanes packages (see #Debian Linux fonts)

Scripts in Pilot Countries

The OLPC XO was originally intended to be distributed to about half a dozen countries as part of a Pilot program. In this section we list the generic language/script requirements for this list of countries. See Ethnologue's country lists for details.

Rwanda

Latin (English, French, Kinyarwanda)

Argentina

Latin (Spanish)

Uruguay

Latin (Spanish)

Libya

Arabic

Brazil

Latin (Portuguese)

Nigeria

Pan-Nigerian (latin with extensions) for Yoruba and Igbo, at least
Hausa Latin or sometimes Arabic

"Ship.2" (the 2007 Give One, Get One release) added these countries and languages with special font requirements.

General list of Scripts

List of Scripts can be found at unicode website [[1]] most of them are not available in the Projects listed below.

Table of scripts, languages, countries [[2]]

A year ago, that was true. Now, nearly all of the essential scripts (writing systems used for official national languages) are supported with Free fonts, keyboard layouts or IMEs, and rendering. The native Mongolian alphabet is the principal exception. The writing systems listed at the site mentioned above for which we do not have adequate support in Linux are:

Batak script
Buginese script
Buhid script
Chakma script
Cham script
Cherokee script
Deseret script
Shavian script
Hanunoo script
Hmong script (not in use - Hmong is mostly written with Latin alphabet)
Javanese script
Lepcha script
Lisu script
Meetai Mayek script
Naxi script
Ranjana script
Parachalit
Samaritan script
Ol Semet
Syloti Nagri script
Tagbanwa script
Tifinagh script
Chu Nom script
Yi script

Some are entirely obsolete, the entire community of speakers having switched to some other writing system (Chu Nom to Latin, in the case of Vietnamese, and so on). Deseret and Shavian are historical relics that never came into actual use. The rest are for minority languages, where the language communities are relatively small and generally bilingual or trilingual.

I would never argue that we shouldn't support these languages and writing systems. But the situation is nowhere near as bad as suggested. I count 30 supported writing systems, encoded in Unicode, with fonts and keyboards/IMEs. (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopic, Thaana, the nine Indic writing systems, Sinhala, Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Lao, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Syriac, Zhuyin)

These cover every official language of every country, except for the use of Mongol script in China, which Soyombo is working on. The list of scripts not fully supported looks nearly as large. I counted 24 above. But only a few of them have significant populations who cannot be reached in other, supported, languages. Most are in Unicode, and have fonts available. Keyboard layouts for most of these languages exist, but have to be put into the xkb format for use with Linux. Some of us are working on that. --Mokurai 22:40, 3 November 2006 (EST)

Font projects

It is not clear yet whether the OLPC will be using fontconfig to manage the fonts. In case it does, then, for Latin/Greek/Cyrillic-based languages there might be a need for a triplet of font faces: sans, serif and monospace. For other scripts, these three faces do not apply, therefore only one font is required.

The current main font used in most Linux distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, SuSE, Debian, etc) is Bitstream Vera. Bitstream Vera supports Basic Latin/Latin-1 and a small proportion of Latin Extended.

The lack of coverage of Latin Extended, Greek, Cyrillic created several derivative font projects.

One of those derivatives is DejaVu, which at version 2.6 supports Basic Latin/Latin-1/Latin Extended/Cyrillic/Greek/Greek Polytonic and other Unicode ranges. DejaVu also supports Unicode symbols (dingbats (PDF), arrows (PDF), etc) which may make it more appealing to kids as they can easily add them to their documents. also Braille Patterns (U+2800-U+28FF) were added in version 2.18.

DejaVu is also the default font in Ubuntu 6.06 which was released on 1st June 2006. It is one of the first distributions that has good font support by default for Latin, Cyrillic and Greek at the same time.

See PDF samples of the DejaVu fonts.

Yes, OLPC uses fontconfig. In release 8.2.0 the default font in Write is DejaVu Serif, DejaVu LGC Sans and DejaVu LGC Sans Mono are also available.

Open fonts catalogs

To find more quality free/libre/open smart fonts with wide Unicode coverage see Fonts under the Open Font License and Unicode Font Guide For Free/Libre Open Source Operating Systems.

Debian Linux fonts

The following Free non-Latin TrueType/Opentype font packages are included in Debian Linux Testing as of November 2006. There are many other kinds of fonts available with Linux, including bitmap console font packages, bitmap X font packages (xfonts-*), PostScript/GhostScript fonts, TeX fonts, and others.

Package	Description	Fonts
ttf-alee	free Hangul truetype fonts made by A Lee.	Bandal, Bangwool, Guseul, Eunjin, and EunjinNakseo
ttf-arabeyes	Arabeyes GPL TrueType Arabic fonts	39 fonts
ttf-Arhangai	Sans Serif font that supports the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet	Arhangai
ttf-arphic-bkai00mp	Arphic Technology Chinese TrueType font, "Arphic Public License".	AR PL KaitiM Big5
ttf-arphic-bsmi00lp	Arphic Technology Chinese TrueType font, "Arphic Public License".	AR PL Mingti2L Big5
ttf-arphic-gbsn00lp	Arphic Technology Chinese TrueType font, "Arphic Public License".	AR PL SungtiL GB
ttf-arphic-gkai00mp	Arphic Technology Chinese TrueType font, "Arphic Public License".	AR PL KaitiM GB
ttf-arphic-ukai	Arphic Technology Chinese TrueType font, "Arphic Public License".	AR PL ZenKai Uni
ttf-arphic-uming	Arphic Technology Chinese TrueType font, "Arphic Public License".	AR PL ShanHeiSun Uni
ttf-baekmuk	Korean fonts	Batang, Dotum, Gulim, Hline
ttf-bengali-fonts	GPL Bengali fonts	7 fonts
ttf-bitstream-vera	Western European languages (ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15) and Turkish (ISO-8859-9)	Vera, Vera Sans, Vera Mono
ttf-bgp-georgian-fonts	Georgian fonts provided by BPG-InfoTech	Chveulebrivi, Courier, Elite, Glaho, Rioni, Unicode
ttf-dejavu	Vera font family extended to fully cover Latin Ext-A, Latin Ext-B, Cyrillic and Greek ranges and also parts of Arabic, Hebrew and some other ranges.	Mono, Sans, Serif
ttf-devanagari-fonts	TrueType and OpenType fonts under GPL for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and Sanskrit	Gargi, Chandas, Kalimati, Lohit, Samanata
ttf-dzongkha	Fonts for language of Bhutan	Dzongkha, Jomolhari
ttf-farsiweb	Unicode Persian fonts	Titr, Nazli, Nazli Bold, and Homa
ttf-freefont	Unicode fonts, covering Latin extensions, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, IPA, Thaana, Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Sinhala, Thai, Georgian, Ethiopic, Kana	FreeMono, FreeSans, FreeSerif
ttf-gentium	Extended Latin, IPA, Ancient and Modern Greek, Cyrillic	Gentium
ttf-gujarati-fonts	TrueType and OpenType fonts released under the GNU General Public License for the Gujarati Language	Rekha, Aakar, Lohit-Gu, Padmaa
ttf-indic-fonts	A package that depends on all the Indic font packages. Provides an easy way to install them all at once.
ttf-isabella	based on the calligraphic hand used in the Isabella Breviary, made around 1497, in Holland, for Isabella of Castille, the first queen of united Spain. It covers all European languages written in the Latin script (with the exception of Sami) and covers all ISO-8859 with the exception of the non-Latin character sets.	Isabella
ttf-Junicode	TrueType Unicode font targetted at medievalists, but including the full range of characters for languages written in the Latin script, International Phonetic Alphabet, Uralic Phonetic Alphabet and Runic	one font per Unicode range covered
ttf-kacst	TrueType Arabic fonts released by the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST)	Art, Book, Decorative, Digital, Farsi, One, OneFixed, Poster, Qurn, Title, TitleL (outline)
ttf-kannada-fonts	TrueType and OpenType fonts released under the GNU General Public License for the Kannada Language	Kedage, Malige
ttf-khmeros	Free fonts for the Khmer language, used in Cambodia, developed by the Khmer Software Iniative, part of the Open Forum of Cambodia.	KhmerOS, System, FreeHand, FastHand, Muol, Metal Chieng
ttf-kochi-gothic	Japanese gothic TrueType font	Kochi Gothic
ttf-kochi-mincho	Japanese Mincho TrueType font	Kochi Mincho
ttf-lao	TrueType font for Lao language	Phetsarath_OT
ttf-malayalam	a set of TrueType and OpenType fonts released under the GNU General Public License for the Malayalam Language.	Racotf04, Malayalam
ttf-mikachan	handwritten Japanese truetype font	Mikachan, Mikachan Proportional, Mikachan Proportional Bold, Mikachan Proportional Small
ttf-mph-2b-damase	SuperUnicode font, including ranges in Plane 1 and ranges added in Unicode (4.1). Some of these ranges include Tifinagh, Kharosthi, hPhags-pa, Old Persian Cuneiform, Limbu etc.	MPH 2B Damase
ttf-nafees	free OpenType Urdu fonts from the Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP, http://www.crulp.org/) at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences	NafeesWeb.ttf
ttf-opensymbol	TrueType font, containing symbols (like fonts as Wingdings(tm)), bullets (needed for bullets in OpenOffice.org) and non-latin characters.	OpenSymbol
ttf-oriya-fonts	TrueType and OpenType fonts released under the GNU General Public License for the Oriya Language	Utkal
ttf-paktype	OpenType Urdu fonts, designed and developed by the PakType volunteers.	Naqsh, Tehreer
ttf-punjabi-fonts	TrueType and OpenType fonts released under the GNU General Public License for the Punjabi Language	Saab, Lohit-PA
ttf-sazanami-gothic	Japanese free Gothic TrueType font, generated from Wadalab font kit	Sazanami Gothic
ttf-sazanami-mincho	Japanese free Mincho TrueType font	Sazanami Mincho
ttf-sil-abyssinica	smart Unicode font for the Ethiopic script, including all languages of Ethiopia	Abyssinica SIL
ttf-sil-charis	smart Unicode font family for Roman or Cyrillic-based writing systems, with near-complete coverage of all the characters defined in Unicode 4.0 for Latin and Cyrillic, plus linguistics symbols	Charis SIL
ttf-sil-doulos	smart Unicode font family for Roman or Cyrillic-based writing systems, with near-complete coverage of all the characters defined in Unicode 4.0 for Latin and Cyrillic, plus linguistics symbols	Doulos SIL
ttf-summersby	partial Unicode support including most West European and Cyrillic languages	Summersby
ttf-tamil-fonts	OpenType fonts released under the GNU General Public License for the Tamil Language.	Kadampari, Kalyani, Maduram, Comic, Paranar, Times
ttf-telugu-fonts	OpenType fonts released under the GNU General Public License for the Telugu Language	Pothana2000, Vemana
ttf-thai-tlwg	free-licensed TrueType fonts, enhanced by developers from Thai Linux Working Group.	Garuda, Norasi, Loma, Tlwg Mono, Tlwg Typewriter, Purisa
ttf-thryomanes	Unicode font covering Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and IPA	Thryomanes
ttf-tmuni	font for Tibetan, Dzongkha and Ladakhi (OpenType Unicode)	Tibetan Machine Uni
ttf-unfonts	Un series Korean TrueType fonts	Batang, Bom, Dotum, Graphic, Gungseo, Novel, Sora, Pen, Heulim, Pilgi, Shinmun, Taza, Yetgeul
ttf-uralic	Uralic fonts containing additional letters used in most Uralic languages using the Cyrillic writing system - Khanty (all dialects), Komi, Mansi (without marking long vowels), Mari, Nenets, Selkup and Udmurt. The fonts also support Altai, Chukchi, Even, Evenki, Koryak and Nanai.	Bookman, Chancery, Gothic, Mono, Palladio, Roman, Sans, Sans Condensed, Schoolbook
ttf-vlgothic	beautiful Japanese free Gothic TrueType font based on ttf-sazanami-gothic and mplus font developed by Project Vine	VL-Gothic-Regular

Other

Available free and **open-source** fonts (feel free to expand)
sans	serif	monospaced
DejaVu Sans (LGC) MgOpenCanonica (lG)	DejaVu Serif (LGC) Gentium (LGc) MgOpenCosmetica MgOpenModata (???) MgOpenModerna (???)	DejaVu Sans Mono (LGC)
Garuda (l, Thai)	N/A	N/A
Table's Notes: L: Covers Latin-based scripts (Basic Latin, Latin-1, Latin Extended) l: Covers Latin-based scripts (Basic Latin, Latin-1) G: Covers Greek (modern, ancient) g: Covers Greek (modern) C: Covers Cyrillic, full table c: Covers Cyrillic, basic support lgc is adequate for more uses such as Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Russian.

Assuming that fontconfig will be used, there is a need of a triplet (sans, serif, monospace).

Feel free to populate the table above.
Any hints on CJK or complex scripts?

FAQ

Q. The main Latin font does not currently support Thai. What can we do?

A. fontconfig supports font preference lists, that is, you can have several different fonts that when combined, can cover as much as possible from the Unicode character space.

For example, if Garuda (Thai font) is suitable for Thai text only, you set first preference to DejaVu and second preference to Garuda. Non-Thai text will be with DejaVu and Thai text with Garuda. If you prefer Garuda for Basic Latin/Thai and no other fonts available, simply put Garuda in the preference list. If you want Garuda for Basic Latin/Thai and any other characters from DejaVu, set first preference to Garuda and second preference to DejaVu.

[Keyboard_Layout_Thai.png] expand

Fonts: Difference between revisions