Re: wanted: font archive

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I'm looking for some freely (as in GPL) available fonts.  What about
> setting up an archive of free fonts which can be used with freetype?

Good idea.  I invite you to do so :-) Seriously, I don't have time to
do that, and maybe we can convince a font site to clearly separate the
fonts into `free' and `nonfree' (in the GPL sense or similar
licenses).

Optimally, such an archive should be erected on ftp.gnu.org so that
the fonts are mirrored worldwide -- some fonts need an enormous amount
of space (e.g. the 4 Arphic fonts need 32MByte uncompressed).

> I followed some links from your pages but found the accompanying
> texts quite obscure wrt. license terms.  Since there was some
> reference to completely copylefted fonts here on the list a couple
> of months back, I'm wondering what happend to them and whether you
> or the FSF/GNU have created such an archive as was proposed.

I've already asked FSF to mirror some GPL'ed CJK fonts a longer time
ago (even twice!), but I got no response.

Richard: This is no complaint, just a remark.  I know that everything
related with FSF is voluntary work.

The following outline fonts are really free AFAIK:

  . Fonts coming with Ghostscript.  There are also some PS Kanji fonts
    (both JIS X 0208 and JIS X 0212); Ken Lunde has converted them to
    CIDFonts (which are available from www.oreilly.com IIRC -- follow
    the links to his CJKV book), and it is easy to convert them to
    Type 1 subfonts also as needed with e.g. LaTeX+dvips (you can find
    instructions in my CJK package on CTAN).

  . Fonts on CTAN (e.g. ftp.dante.de).  Most of the core TeX fonts
    have been converted from Metafont to both Type 1 and TTF and are
    excellent in quality.  There you can also find free Korean PS
    subfonts and some others (and free Korean TTFs, but I'm not sure
    about its license).  Tako Hoekwater is in the business to convert
    more and more fonts in Metafont format to Type 1 to make them
    available with pdfTeX (if he has time to do so).  One of the next
    projects (AFAIK) is to convert Han The Thanh's Vietnamese fonts in
    the vnr package.

    Most of them will be on the next TeX Live CD, BTW, which you get
    for free if you join a TeX Users Group like DANTE, TUG, or
    GUTenberg.

  . Arphic's CJK TrueType fonts: two in GB encoding, two in Big 5
    encoding.

  . Some Cyrillic fonts can be found at Russian hosts; I've CC'ed
    Vladimir Volovich who knows that better than me.


      Werner