[tex-live] new fonts from SIL

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Sat Feb 4 16:04:51 CET 2006


The Unicode list this morning carried this announcement, and I think
that we should examine the license to see whether it could be included
in future TeX Live distributions (also, list readers who are Debian
folks, with their different views of licensing, may wish to do the
same):

>> ...
>> SIL International is pleased to announce the official release of the 
>> Charis SIL Unicode fonts (http://scripts.sil.org/CharisSILfont). Charis 
>> SIL provides a single Unicode-based font family that contains 
>> near-complete coverage of all the characters defined in Unicode 4.1 for 
>> Latin and Cyrillic-based writing systems, whether used for phonetic or 
>> orthographic needs. In addition, there is provision for other characters 
>> and symbols useful to linguists. These fonts make use of state-of-the-art 
>> font technologies to support complex typographic issues, such as the need 
>> to position arbitrary combinations of base glyphs and diacritics 
>> optimally.
>> 
>> Charis SIL is a serif, proportionally-spaced font optimized for 
>> readability in long printed documents, and is similar in design to 
>> Bitstream Charter, one of the first fonts designed specifically for laser 
>> printers. It is highly readable and holds up well in less-than-ideal 
>> reproduction environments. It also has a full set of styles - regular, 
>> italic, bold, and bold italic. It has been released under SIL's Open Font 
>> License (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL): 
>> 
>> The goals of the Open Font License (OFL) are to stimulate worldwide 
>> development of cooperative font projects, to support the font creation 
>> efforts of academic and linguistic communities, and to provide an open 
>> framework in which fonts may be shared and improved in partnership with 
>> others.
>> 
>> The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and 
>> redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The 
>> fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded, 
>> redistributed and sold with any software provided that the font names of 
>> derivative works are changed. The fonts and derivatives, however, cannot 
>> be released under any other type of license.
>> 
>> At the same time, SIL has also released an update of the Doulos SIL font 
>> (See http://scripts.sil.org/DoulosSILfont) to match the character set 
>> represented in Charis SIL.
>> ...

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
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