Fonts

To discuss the content of this page, visit Talk:Fonts (it's the link labeled Discussion above).

Fonts

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]]

Scripts in Pilot Countries

The OLPC will be initially 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. It is important to provide adequate support for these countries by choosing the most suitable fonts available.

Brasil

• Latin

China

• Tibetan བོད་ཡིག
• Simplified chinese 简体字

India

• Bengali
• Devanagari
• Gujarati
• Gurmukhi
• Kannada
• Limbu
• Malayalam
• Oriya
• Sinhala
• Syloti Nagri
• Tamil
• Telugu

Nigeria

• Pannigerian (latin with extensions)

Thailand

• Thai

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.

DejaVu is also the default font in Ubuntu 6.06 which will be released on 1st June 2006. It will be 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.

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.

Table of available fonts

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)

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 Garda for Basic Latin/Thai and any other characters from DejaVu, set first preference to Garuda and second preference to DejaVu.

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