Subject: Unifont archive version 1:5.1.20080820


OVERVIEW
--------
The Unifont is a dual-width (8x16/16x16) bitmap font, designed to provide
coverage for all of Unicode Plane 0, the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
This version has a glyph for each visible code point in the Unicode 5.1
Basic Multilingual Plane.

Note that this version of the Unifont only provides a single glyph
for each character, making it impossible to handle any language that
needs context-dependent character shaping well. It is supplied in the
form of a hex file, with a converter to convert it to bdf. See
http://czyborra.com/unifont/ or http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html
for more information.

This is the unifoundry.com collection of utilities for the GNU
Unifont, assembled by Paul Hardy with the encouragement of the
font's creator, Roman Czyborra.  This archive contains the following
directories:

     dat       Reference versions of data files
     font      All the font information
     Makefile  The "make" file
     man       Unix man pages
     README    This file
     src       Source programs, in Perl and C

The original version of this README file was written by David Starner
and modified by Paul Hardy in 2008.


src/ AUTHORS
------------
Right now, all the Perl files in the src directory except "hex2sfd"
were written by Roman Czyborra (or in the case of johab2ucs2, by
Jungshik Shin, who then gave it to Roman).  Roman originally named
the "src/hexbraille" script as simply "braille"; Paul Hardy thought
there was too great a chance of a conflict with other utilities,
and so renamed it.  The "hex2bdf-split" Perl script in the source
directory is an adaptation of Roman's "hex2bdf" script that
David Starner wrote in 1999.

Luis Gonzalez Miranda wrote the original "hex2sfd" Perl script,
as well as a "howto-build.sh" shell script that Paul Hardy converted
into "./font/ttfsrc/Makefile".

All the C programs were written by Paul Hardy.

All Makefiles in this distribution were originally written by
Paul Hardy, and groomed for Debian by Anthony Fok.


unifont AUTHORS
---------------
Roman Czyborra created the original GNU Unifont, including the
.hex format.  For greater detail, see the HISTORY section below.

David Starner aggregated many glyphs contributed by others and
built these into earlier unifont releases.

Qianqian Fang began his Wen Quan Yi fonts in 2004; most of the
almost 30,000 CJK ideographs in the latest unifont were taken
from Wen Quan Yi with permission of Qianqian Fang.  The glyphs
in "./font/hexsrc/wqy-cjk.hex" are for the most part Qianqian
Fang's unibit and 12pt Wen Quan Yi glyphs.

Changwoo Ryu created the 11,172 thick-stroke Hangul Syllables glyphs
using thin-stroke glyphs from the xfonts-baekmuk Debian package, in
the file unifont.bdf in the Debian bf-utf-source package.  The fonts
in the xfonts-baekmuk Debian package were created by Jeong-Hwan Kim.
Replacing the thick-stroke Hangul glyphs was a desire expressed by
Roman Czyborra for years.

Paul Hardy merged Qianqian Fang's unibit and Wen Quan Yi glyphs
into the GNU Unifont (with lots of help and enthusiasm from Qianqian
Fang), copied the Hangul Syllables glyphs from Changwoo Ryu's copy
of unifont.bdf, drew about 8,500 more glyphs, and replaced the
existing Tibetan glyphs with new ones contributed by Rich Felker.


LICENSE
-------
Roman Czyborra released his work (Perl scripts and font .hex files)
under the following terms:

     All of my works you find here are freeware. You may
     freely copy, use, quote, modify or redistribute them
     as long as you properly attribute my contribution and
     have given a quick thought about whether Roman might
     perhaps be interested to read what you did with his
     stuff. Horizontal rules don't apply.

David Starner released what in this package is named "hex2bdf-split"
under the same license as Roman Czyborra's work.

License for all of Paul Hardy's work (except "johab2ucs2" and
"blanks.hex", mentioned separately), Makefile and debian/ mods
by Anthony Fok, and modified software from Luis Gonzalez Miranda
(with permission granted to Paul Hardy):

     These are released under the terms of the GNU General Public
     License version 2, or (at your option) a later version.

License for Fonts:

     Any fonts using glyphs from the "wqy-cjk.hex" file (including
     the default TrueType font) are bound by the terms of the Wen
     Quan Yi font license.  Those fonts are released under the terms
     of the GNU General Public License (GPL) versionn 2, with the
     exception that embedding the font in a document does not by
     itself bind that document to the terms of the GNU GPL.

     Any fonts that do not use glyphs from the "wqy-cjk.hex" file
     fall under the above "License for all of Roman Czyborra's work".

     The fonts in "./font/precompiled" do use wqy-cjk.hex, and so
     are licensed under the GNU GPL version 2, with the exception
     that embedding the font in a document does not in itself bind
     that document to the terms of the GNU GPL.  The following
     paragraphs explaining the exception is taken from the Wen
     Quan Yi font distribution:

          ** GPL v2.0 license with font embedding exception:

          As a special exception, if you create a document which
          uses this font, and embed this font or unaltered portions
          of this font into the document, this font does not by
          itself cause the resulting document to be covered by
          the GNU General Public License. This exception does not
          however invalidate any other reasons why the document
          might be covered by the GNU General Public License.
          If you modify this font, you may extend this exception
          to your version of the font, but you are not obligated
          to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this
          exception statement from your version.

License for "blanks.hex":

     There is one exception to the above rules: Paul Hardy earlier
     released the "blanks.hex" file into the public domain.


HISTORY
-------
Roman Czyborra <[email protected]> began the GNU Unifont in 1998
as a low quality font to provide a glyph for every Unicode character
in the Basic Multilingual Plane.  He realized that no one font at
the time had complete coverage of the Unicode BMP.  Czyborra.com still
has several cool tools for the unifont not included here.

Since Roman Czyborra was unable to maintain the Unifont for a while,
and many patches existed on [email protected]
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnu-unifont), David Starner
<[email protected]> decided to make a new release extending the
Unifont with many characters in 1999.  That was the foundation of earlier
GNU Unifont releases in Debian.

By 2004, work had stopped on the GNU Unifont.  Qianqian Fang wanted to
create a high-quality Chinese Unicode font in 2004.  He began by copying
the GNU Unifont.  He replaced its Latin glyphs with another X11 font.
He replaced the existing main CJK ideographs with a higher quality font
that the People's Republic of China had placed in the public domain.
The new CJK glyphs in the ranges U+3400..U+4DB5 and U+4E00..U+9FA5
were developed from the Chinese National Standard GB19966-2005.

Qianqian named this new font "unibit", and released it under the terms
of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2, with the exception that
embedding his font in a document did not by itself bind that document
to the terms of the GNU GPL.

Today the Wen Quan Yi font collection includes hand-drawn CJK ideographs
in 9pt, 10pt, 11pt, and 12pt as well as a vector font.  The 12pt type
has glyphs the same size as the GNU Unifont, except it adds two more
pixels of leading (blank space) below each line.  This makes CJK easier
to read.  For these reasons, Wen Quan Yi is recommended over the GNU Unifont
for anyone planning to primarily use CJK ideographs.

See http://wqy.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/enindex.cgi (English) or
http://wenq.org (Chinese) for more information on Wen Quan Yi.

In 2006, the GNU Unifont package was orphaned in Debian.

In late 2007, Paul Hardy became interested in adding to the GNU Unifont.
He wrote a couple of programs to convert GNU Unifont .hex files to and
from bitmap images for easy editing with any graphics software.  He began
by combining the latest glyphs available for the GNU Unifont.  This
starting point was posted at http://czyborra.com as the 2007-12-31 version
of unifont.hex.  Shortly after that, Roman Czyborra's website went down.
Paul Hardy then started posting complete copies of GNU Unifont on his
website, "http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html".

Roman Czyborra encouraged Paul Hardy to continue this work on GNU Unifont.

In early 2008, Paul Hardy learned of Qianqian Fang's work.  Qianqian
encouraged a combining of effort, and Paul Hardy at that point created
two versions of the GNU Unifont: one with the original Chinese ideographs
(which Roman Czyborra copied from a Japanese font in the public domain),
and one with Qianqian Fang's Wen Quan Yi (Spring of Letters) ideographs.
The Wen Quan Yi font provides far more coverage of CJK ideographs than
the original Japanese font did, and is of higher quality.

Paul Hardy created a version of both the font with the original CJK
ideographs from Japan and with CJK ideographs from Wen Quan Yi that
contained combining circles.  He then wrote a post-processing program
to remove the combining circles from the final font.

In 2005, Luis Gonzalez Miranda (http://www.lgm.cl) created a set of
Fontforge scripts and Perl programs.  Paul Hardy modified Luis' software
in 2008 to cover the full Unicode 5.1 Basic Multilingual Plane range.
Luis gave Paul Hardy permission to release this modified version under
the terms of "the GNU General Public License, version 2 or (at your
option) a later version."

On 4 July 2008, Paul Hardy was looking through all of Roman Czyborra's
Perl scripts.  One of these, "braille", contained a comment from 2003
that the original GNU Unifont did not generate its Braille patterns
(U+2800..U+28FF) correctly.  The modified script fixed that bug.  Paul
Hardy incorporated the correct Braile glyphs into the 6 July 2008
release of the GNU Unifont.  All previous versions probably contain
this Braille bug and should be replaced.

Other notable additions include:

     - Incorporation of CJK glyphs from Qianqian Fang's fonts
     - Incorporation of Rich Felker's Tibetan glyphs
     - Replacement of the Hangul Syllables block with a thin stroke font
       (Roman had mentioned wanting to do this someday on his website)
     - Addition of circled pencil glyphs for the Private Use Area
       (suggested as an accpetable rendering in the Unicode 5.0 Standard)
     - Proper handling of combining characters in the TrueType version
     - Proper handling of space glyphs in the TrueType version

The hex2bdf script in this release is Roman's original script, not the
modified version that produced two BDF files (one for 8 pixel wide glyphs
and another for 16 pixel wide glyphs).  The TrueType font should be used
in preference to the BDF font, so this is probably a moot point.  Debian
doesn't even allow BDF fonts to be installed any longer; the Debian Policy
Manual now states that BDF fonts must be converted to PCF format.  The
only program that might still benefit from the BDF font is Yudit, which
works with a single, dual-width unifont.bdf file.


BUILDING
--------
To make the binaries from the top directory, type

     make

The compiled programs will be in the "./bin" directory.  To make
and install the binaries and install the man pages, review the
destination directories in the Makefiles and then type

     make install

To make the fonts, bitmap charts, etc. within the "font" directory,
install the "bdftopcf" program and FontForge.  Then from the top-level
directory type

     cd font
     make

The resulting fonts will be in the "./font/compiled" directory, along
with bitmap renderings of each glyph before and after the removal of
combining circle marks.

WARNING: Building the TrueType version of GNU Unifont will require
anywhere from 256 MByte to 1 GByte of virtual memory, possibly take
an hour (it takes about 2.5 hours on a Pentium P3 IBM Thinkpad running
Debian Etch), and can require almost 250 Megabytes of free disk space
during the build.  During the TrueType build, FontForge will monopolize
your CPU...plan accordingly.

There is no reason to build the font from scratch unless you modify
the .hex font source files (or must satisfy an insatiable curiosity),
because the "./font/precompiled" directory already contains pre-built
BDF, PCF, and TrueType fonts.

If you've made a new version of the font, hand-copy the new font
file(s) to your desired destination.  Otherwise, precompiled PCF
and TrueType versions of the font will be copied "./font/precompiled/"
into $(DESTDIR)/usr/share/fonts.

After font installation, you might need to restart the X Window System
for the new fonts to be recognized, but first try the command

     xset fp rehash

in a shell (terminal) window.  If that doesn't work, restart the X
Window System.

Building the fonts will not overwrite the "./font/precompiled" directory.
So if you start building the TrueType font and then have second thoughts,
there's no harm in interrupting the font build.  You can always fall
back on what's in "./font/precompiled".

To remove intermediate files, from the top-level directory type

     make clean

To remove all created files and leave the directory in its pre-build
state, from the top-level directory type

     make distclean

That will remove the ./bin directory, the ./font/compiled directory,
and other intermediate files.


OPEN ISSUES
-----------
* Should we try to extend it to ligatures and other complex language 
support? Robert Brady's extensions to BDF mean that we could
productively extend unifont to do that, and the extensions would be
usable with GTK 2.0.  Now that there is a TrueType version, full
support of complex scripts is within the realm of possibility.

* Some CJK ideographs use an entire 16x16 pixel grid.  This leaves
insufficient space between lines.  However, changing to a non-square
grid would distort the block drawing glyphs.  The best solution is
probalby to use GNU Unifont for mostly non-CJK glyph rendering, and
to use Qianqian Fang's Wen Quan Yi fonts (http://wenq.org) for
predominately CJK glyph rendering.  The Wen Quan Yi fonts use extra
leading (blank space) between lines.

* The arrows from 21E6 to 21F0 should be redesigned to look the same, as
far as possible within the Unifont's constraints.

* Review Mathematical Symbols and Box Drawing Symbols so they look good
  combined with each other as intended.