Fonts

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

Introduction

Because the OLPC will be used in many different countries with different writing systems and scripts, it needs to have fairly broad font support. In addition, the OLPC is targetted at regions where there are currently very few computers in use. This means that existing fonts may not support the full set of glyphs required. The OLPC relies on the Unicode support in GTK+/Pango, Python, and Linux in order to input, manipulate and display text. There are many Unicode fonts available but in order to be used on the OLPC, we either need an open-source font (preferable) or a license to use the font.

Unicode Fonts

• Alan Wood's comprehensive list of Unicode font coverage.
• David McCreedy's Gallery of 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

[[1]] Arabic and Arabic-derived, including the following:

Kurdish

Pashto

Persian, Dari Azeri, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Uzbek

[[2]] Sindhi and Parkari

Uighur

[[3]] 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.

[[4]]

Abyssinica SIL "If you wanted to distribute SIL fonts, you would need an OEM license..."

Pan-Nigerian

This uses the Latin-Extended ranges supported by Gentium.

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.

[[5]]

Devanagari

[[6]] Used to write Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Nepalese, and other languages.

Gujarati

[[7]]

Gurmukhi

Gurmukhi is the alphabet used to write Punjabi.

[[8]]

Kannada

[[9]]

Malayalam

[[10]]

Oriya

[[11]]

Tamil

[[12]]

Telugu

[[13]]

Southeast Asian

Burmese (Myanmar)

[[14]]

Khmer (Cambodia, Kampuchea)

[[15]]

Lao

[[16]]

Sinhala (Sri Lanka)

[[17]]

Thai

[[18]]

Vietnamese

[[19]]

Central Asian

Tibetan

[[20]] 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

[[21]]

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 Ethopia's Coptic Christians.

Syriac

The Syriac script is used to write the Aramaic language used in the Orthodox Christian church headed by the Patriarch of Antioch. Followers of this church are found in various middle eastern countries such as Syria and Lebanon.

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

[[22]]

Georgian

[[23]]

Thaana

[[24]]

Cherokee

[[25]]

Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics

[[26]]

Braille Patterns

[[27]]

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.

Brazil

• Latin

China

• Mongolian
• Simplified chinese Simplified Chinese(简体字)
• Tibetan Tibetan script(བོད་ཡིག)
• Traditional Chinese Traditional Chinese(繁体字/正体字)
• Uyghur:(شىنجاڭ ئۇيغۇر ئاپتونوم رايونى)

India

• Bengali Bengali(বাংলা লিপি)
• Devanagari Devanagari(देवनागरी)
• Gujarati Gujarati(ગુજરાતી(
• Gurmukhi Gurmukhi(ਗੁਰਮੁਖੀ)
• Kannada Kannada(ಕನ್ನಡ)
• Limbu Limbu
• Malayalam Malayalam(മലയാളം)
• Oriya Oriya
• Sinhala Sinhala
• Syloti Nagri Syloti Nagri
• Tamil Tamil(தமிழ்)
• Telugu Telugu

Nigeria

• Pan-Nigerian (latin with extensions)

Thailand

• Thai Thai script(คอลัมน์ประจำวัน)

General list of Scripts

List of Scripts can be found at unicode website [[28]] most of them are not available in the Projects listed below. Table of scripts, languages, countries [[29]]

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 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.

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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