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Table of Contents

Free and Open Source Fonts

If your language doesn’t use traditional Latin characters then most likely you will need to look at fonts. Here we try to list fonts that you can actually change to add your characters.

Resources

Font List

We probably need to start classifiying this list: decrotive, bitmap, etc.

Determining Font Coverage

What characters are included in a font? This is often hard to work out and tedious if you have to type and check characters. Its easier to let fontforge do the work for you. Here are the steps to be followed:

  1. Open the font file(s): TTF, etc using fontforge
  2. Save as a fontforge .sfd file
  3. Use status.pl from the DejaVu project to create a coverage file

This example creates a coverage file for Micrsoft’s Arial Unicode font:

$ fontforge ARIALUNI.TTF # File Save As... and make sure you save an SFD file
$ touch ArialUnicodeMS.status.txt
$ ./status.pl original ArialUnicodeMS.status.txt ArialUnicodeMS.sfd  >> ArialUnicodeMS.status.txt.new
$ vim ArialUnicodeMS.status.txt.new # to view the coverage

Coverage -- a future hack

Ideally you need a small app that can output coverage or more ideally if fed a font or font directory plus a list of required code points it will return a list of fonts that can satisfy the requirements. It should run on either Windows or Linux, be able to find the system font directory by default or be supplied with a directory or font file. It must be able to output all code points covered or return a coverage percentage if a list of required code points is supplied.

The following links could prove usefull in building such an app: