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Unicode fonts and tools for X11

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html

The classic X Window System bitmap fonts are now available in an ISO 10646-1/Unicode extension.

UTF-8 xterm screenshot using 6x13.bdf

We have extended all the "-misc-fixed-*" fonts:

5x7     -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--7-70-75-75-C-50-ISO10646-1
5x8     -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--8-80-75-75-C-50-ISO10646-1
6x9     -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--9-90-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1
6x10    -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--10-100-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1
6x12    -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Semicondensed--12-110-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1
6x13    -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1
6x13B   -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1
7x13    -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1
7x13B   -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1
7x14    -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--14-130-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1
7x14B   -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--14-130-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1
8x13    -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-80-ISO10646-1
8x13B   -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-80-ISO10646-1
9x15    -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--15-140-75-75-C-90-ISO10646-1
9x15B   -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--15-140-75-75-C-90-ISO10646-1
10x20   -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--20-200-75-75-C-100-ISO10646-1

Coverage

These fonts contain now all characters found in the following character sets:

ISO 8859 parts 1-5, 7-10, 13-15 (i.e., all parts except Arabic and Thai)
ISO 6937 and the CEN MES-1 European Unicode Subset
IBM/Microsoft code pages CP 437, 850, 1251, 1252, and many others
Microsoft/Adobe Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4)
KOI8-R
DEC VT100 graphics symbols

The 6x13, 8x13, 9x15, 9x18, and 10x20 fonts cover a much larger repertoire in addition, that covers the comprehensive CEN MES-3A European Unicode 3.2 Subset, the International Phonetic Alphabet, Armenian, Georgian, Thai, Yiddish, all Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic characters, all mathematical symbols (including the entire TeX repertoire), APL, Braille, Runes, and much more. 9x15 and 10x20 also cover Ethiopian.

Newly added fonts

The following new "-misc-fixed-*" fonts were added:

6x13O   -Misc-Fixed-Medium-O-SemiCondensed--13-120-75-75-C-60-ISO10646-1
7x13O   -Misc-Fixed-Medium-O-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-70-ISO10646-1
8x13O   -Misc-Fixed-Medium-O-Normal--13-120-75-75-C-80-ISO10646-1
9x18    -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1
9x18B   -Misc-Fixed-Bold-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1
12x13ja -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal-ja-13-120-75-75-C-120-ISO10646-1
18x18ja -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal-ja-18-120-100-100-C-180-ISO10646-1
18x18ko -Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal-ko-18-120-100-100-C-180-ISO10646-1

6x13O, 7x13O and 8x13O are oblique/italic versions of 6x13, 7x13 and 8x13. 9x18 is an improved version of 9x15 that has more space above and below the base characters to increase readability and to allow overstriking combining characters to work properly. 18x18ja and 18x18ko provide Japanese and Korean doublewidth ideograms for 9x18. 12x13ja provides Japanese doublewidth ideograms for 6x13.

Adobe BDF fonts

I have also created revised ISO10646-1 versions of all the Adobe and B&H pixel fonts that come with X11R6.4. They contained about 30 additional Postscript characters (roughly the CP1252 repertoire) that were present in the old ISO8859-1 BDF files, but were not encoded and therefore not accessible for X clients. The revised ISO10646-1 versions contain not only these but also many more automatically generated accented Latin characters (e.g., all characters from ISO 8859 parts 1-4, 9-10, 13-15), and they also fix a few long-standing bugs with the old fonts (missing NBSP, exchanged multiplication/division sign, etc.).

Status

The fonts are now completed and implement at present version 3.2 of the Unicode standard (ISO 10646-1/Amd.1:2002). I will maintain them to fix bugs and to satisfy any newly reported user requirements. Note that the new fonts fix a problem with the Latin-1 quotation mark and accents.

Download

The fonts are freely available with installation instructions and example UTF-8 text files.

The "-misc-fixed-*" font package: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz CJK ideographic wide character supplement (unpack into the same subdirectory as the above): http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts-asian.tar.gz The Adobe and B&H font package: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts-75dpi100dpi.tar.gz

There is also a change log file for the "-misc-fixed-*" fonts. Other character sets

The font packages include the ucs2any.pl Perl script, which converts ISO 10646-1 fonts into any other encoding for which there is a Unicode mapping table available. This way, you can quickly generate ISO 8859-* versions from the above fonts automatically, for the benefit of older software that cannot yet handle ISO 10646-1 fonts directly.

Distribution

I periodically contribute a recent snapshot of all of the above fonts to XFree86 and they have been shipping as part of the XFree86 releases since XFree86 4.1. I have also made them available to X.Org for inclusion into one of the next official X11 distributions as a replacement for the current ISO 8859-1 BDF fonts (hopefully they will be in X11R6.7). The copyright status of these fonts remains the same as for the original fonts in the X11 distribution, therefore any X11 server vendors are welcome to include them into their products without payment of royalties.

Other information relevant to Unicode font projects

Luc Devroye's Font software page is a very comprehensive collection of pointers to further font resources.

http://www-cgrl.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/fontsoftware.html

Ulf Jordan's Misc-Fixed ISO 10646-1 Outline Font Project is to develop Type1 versions of the BDF font family provided here. http://www.etek.chalmers.se/~e4jordan/font/