I then discovered that all the documents and websites that use Thai text are displayed incorrectly - even the add text feature in Paint!! Thai is an abugida script, with vowels and other marks sometimes on top or underneath letters.
These 'accents' tend to display slightly to the side rather on top of the letter or if they do display on top then the position overlaps with the character, rendering the text unreadable! What was bizarre is that websites that are standardized on Arial Unicode MS also became unreadable. I can't seem to find what the new standard unicode font is and I managed to find some Thai fonts to use as a replacement. However, so far none of the fonts I have found display Thai characters in the standard, 'classic' way - as used in Thailand by official printers and schools and other official publishers.
So many of my documents designed for children and learners of the Thai language no longer display or print correctly. The only way to change the website display is to manually select a different font in View, or to modify the CSS files in the website directly for sites that I have control over and select alternative fonts. The problem is that not everybody has the same fonts installed on their computer.
I've tested this on other computers - it's a universal problem. The problem does not exist on Windows XP, 7 or 8 or 8. And what is currently the 'standard' or 'universal' font for all versions of Windows and Macs and androids and IOS devices and Linux platforms to select for documents and websites so that everybody can view multilingual texts including Thai without having to manually install a separate font?
If one needs to instruct users to install a 'universal' font, what is it and where can it be downloaded from? This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread. Threats include any threat of suicide, violence, or harm to another. Any content of an adult theme or inappropriate to a community web site.
Any image, link, or discussion of nudity. Any behavior that is insulting, rude, vulgar, desecrating, or showing disrespect. Any behavior that appears to violate End user license agreements, including providing product keys or links to pirated software. I also include other important Unicode fonts, including a few notable shareware fonts where the authors request payment of a fee after an initial free evaluation.
Although this document focuses on vector fonts that work well on free operating systems, these fonts will also work well on Unicode-capable Windows operating systems Windows and XP and on Apple OSX. Please note that other, more extensive online font guides do exist. In particular Alan Wood's Unicode fonts for Windows computers is an extensive resource which covers commercial, shareware, and free fonts. In contrast to Mr. Wood's site, I have focused on Open Source, non-governmental organization NGO , and government-sponsored font and script initiatives that aim to facilitate computing in national and indigenous languages throughout the world.
Some of the included font projects provide numerous fonts. In these cases, I have also tried to include images of a representative sample of the available fonts. Note that many fonts are packaged in. Under free Unices, just use the unzip utility from your terminal. Some fonts are packaged in self-extracting. Here again you can simply use the unzip utility since the.
If today you are feeling impatient and wish that you could just download all the fonts referenced on this site while blithely sipping your coffee or tea -- well now you can almost do just that by using this simple DownloadFonts.
The script will download a large set of the very best FLOSS international fonts referenced on this site. The script requires that you have the wget , tar , and unzip utilities, as well as the fontforge font editor. The script will download font files to a fonts subdirectory under the current working directory. The shell script has been recently revised by Dugan Chen and now supports resuming downloads after broken sessions. Thanks, Dugan!
Go ahead and give it a try -- this is by far the fastest way to gather the best international FLOSS fonts from all across the planet. As time has gone on and this site has become increasingly popular, more and more people have contributed by suggesting new fonts, updating me on changed links, or informing me of fonts that have switched over to SIL's new OFL license.
Thanks to everyone for helping to keep this site up-to-date with current information! I would also like to thank Ritu Khanna and Monisha Sharma for their generous help with testing and preparing the Indic font samples which appear in the South Asian section of this guide.
Dugan Chen also deserves special mention for taking my half-baked shell script for downloading fonts and turning it into something more useful.
This page is under a state of constant construction, especially due to the fact that recently there has been more and more Open Source font activity. Please continue to send me news and information about new Open Source font releases that are of interest to the Open Source development and user communities at large.
Also note that these pages still have some gaps, especially for minority scripts which have only recently been added into Unicode. In some cases, I have not yet had time to research a script thoroughly. In other cases, I have researched a script, but not yet found any GPL'ed or otherwise liberally licensed fonts for that script.
Additional information to help fill in the gaps will be greatly appreciated. Pan-Unicode fonts are large fonts that cover a significant number of script blocks defined by the Unicode standard. Pan-Unicode fonts are useful if you occasionally work with other languages and don't feel like installing a large number of script-specific fonts.
One disadvantage of pan-Unicode fonts are that glyphs from different scripts are often not aesthetically integrated across script blocks. Secondly, since it is nearly impossible for one or a few font designers to have been thoroughly schooled in the typographic traditions of numerous cultures and nations, glyphs in some of the script blocks may be of lower technical or aesthetic quality than glyphs in other script blocks.
Finally, differences in national typographic traditions can lead to situations where glyphs which are adequate in one country appear odd or inappropriate in another country. For example, glyphs that are ideal for writing Arabic in Egypt are very likely not ideal for writing Urdu in Pakistan, even though both languages share the same basic alphabet. Similarly, even though the assignment of code points for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters of Chinese origin has been unified in Unicode, the glyph forms of Japanese Kanji may be inappropriate for writing Chinese in Mainland China, and vice-versa.
For these reasons, if you use a certain subset of scripts or national script variants frequently, it is better in the long run to obtain fonts designed to cover those scripts or national variants specifically. Take a look at the tabbed pages that follow to find various script-specific or region-specific fonts. Several factors have emerged in recent years which, in my mind, have greatly reduced the perceived necessity and utility of the Pan-Unicode fonts.
First, an increasing number of free and liberally-licensed Unicode fonts of very high quality for specific scripts and specific uses such as scholarly have been released by dedicated groups and individuals. The existence of George Williams' Open Source FontForge outline font editor has certainly played an important role in the democratization of typography. Secondly, the flexibility of Keith Packard's Fontconfig library allows the construction via simple XML-based configuration files of virtual font sets such as "sans" and "serif" which can do a better job than any one Pan-Unicode font can at covering the Unicode code space with high-quality glyphs coming out of projects such as those highlighted in the previous paragraph.
We have now arrived at a historic turning-point in the evolution of Open Source digital typography and, in the broader context, of Open Source systems in general. The typographically-inclined salamanders have emerged from the depauperate Jurassic morass and, inspired by the fresh possibilities of a new era, a diverse Creataceous flowering of free, high-quality fonts is emerging to fill every niche and ecosystem. Pan-Unicode fonts may still be useful as fall-back fonts of last resort, but clearly their role in any kind of high-quality typographic endeavour is now much reduced.
The project has now added numerous scripts and symbol blocks primarily by borrowing glyphs from other freely licensed fonts en masse. Symbol coverage includes Mathematical Operators, Geometrical shapes, Diacritical marks, Western music, and Byzantine music, inter alia.
Among TrueType fonts with extensive Unicode coverage, this font has historically been one of the best that could be downloaded for free. The Bitstream Cyberbit Font License permits the licensee to use the font for free on only one system.
Not recommended for Thai. Although the font contains a full set of Thai glyphs, the positioning of vowel and tone marks, while readable in most cases, is not always typographically correct. Looking carefully at the glyphs in this font, it is evident that Mr. Kass' objective has been to cover as much of the BMP as possible rather than to design a beautiful font. He has certainly achieved this objective, as this is one of the few fonts available with extensive coverage of many scripts, including scripts only recently added into the Unicode standard for which fonts are difficult to find or not yet available elsewhere, such as Canadian Syllabics, Limbu, and Buginese.
Code has OpenType tables for some but not all of the Indic and other complex text layout CTL scripts for which glyphs are present in the font. Code is therefore not a general solution for Indic and CTL scripts, but may be useful in creating Unicode charts where only isolated forms of CTL script characters are required.
Kass is also working on Code and Code which cover parts of Unicode Plane 1 and Plane 2 respectively. The type designer and linguist Michael Everson has been extremely active in the development of the Unicode Standard. He has contributed more proposals for encoding of the world's scripts in Unicode than anyone else.
Originally available only for Macintosh, the font is now finally available to PC users as well. As this is a mono-spaced font, you might try using it as the console font in your terminal application.
MPH Damase is a pan-Unicode font from fixedsys. Released into the public domain, MPH Damase has coverage of many Unicode script blocks, including many not readily available in other fonts. See the East Asian section. A few years ago, Mr. Cyzborra's excellent web site vanished from the internet along, one is forced to speculate, with its author. However, unicodecharacter. Additionally, at least six pages of the author's original website at czyborra.
At that time, the site consisted of 19 pages of material. The resurrected site, which appears to have come on line in February of , is shown on the Wayback Machine as having six pages of material. Paul Hardy at Unifoundry. A lot of work has gone into improving glyph legibility, especially for orthographies such as Korean. Kass' and Mr. Everson's fonts are notable exceptions.
Ethiopic is the primary writing system of Eritrea and Ethiopia where the writing system is called "Ge'ez", "Fidel", or "Fidelat". The script is used to write classic ge'ez, tgrNa, amarNa, guragiNa and other languages. See SIL's documentation for details. The Ethiopic Unicode Resource Page provides fonts, keyboards, and other useful links. Ethiopia Jiret and GF Zemen are two fonts mentioned on this page. James Kass' pan-Unicode Code font also contains Ethiopic glyphs.
One-third to one-half of the population of Morocco is Berber, and many speakers of Berber languages also reside in the neighboring North African countries of Algeria, Libya, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
The script has been taught in primary schools in Morocco since Several other Tifinagh fonts are also available from this Hapax font directory. A sample Tifinagh web site may be found here.
The Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe has a lot of additional information on their web site, including this interactive introduction to the alphabet. North American Indian languages are written using the Latin script with various diacritics, unified Canadian Syllabics or, in the case of Cherokee, the Cherokee alphabet. Christopher Harvey at LanguageGeek. In addition, he now has a number of new specialized fonts which have been optimized for writing specific languages and orthographic variants.
His excellent web site is well worth a visit. In , the Gnome Foundation reached an agreement with Bitstream to release a number of fonts under an open source license. Only covers Latin. Raph Levien has two nearly-complete fonts under the OFL :. Century Catalogue is a close revival of Century Oldstyle and is, according to the author, quite close to release.
Inconsolata is a monospaced humanist sans font designed for use in code listings for print media. Levien has some other fonts in the development pipeline which may also be of interest. A basic version of Levien's Typo Script script font designed for math typesetting is also planned for release under the OFL. The MgOpen Typeface Collection consists of four professional typefaces that have now been released under an open source license by Magenta Ltd.
The terms of the license agreement were modeled closely after the Bitstream Vera licensing terms. These Unicode fonts are appropriate for monotonic Greek. A fifth typeface, MgOpenApolyta for polytonic Greek will be released in the near future after Latin is added to the font. SIL International has released a Greek Unicode font, Galatia , which contains all diacritical marks needed for ancient and biblical Greek.
At least three of these fonts have now been licensed under the OFL. Vangelis Makridakis, a Greek designer, has recently released five new display fonts under the GPL with a clarification allowing embedding.
These new OpenType fonts cover modern Greek and Latin and can be downloaded here. These fonts are designed to be metrically equivalent to widely used proprietary Microsoft platform fonts.
Red Hat's press release may be found here. The Bitstream license accompanying the Vera font set explicitely permits additions and modifications if the modified fonts are released under a different name. In addition to providing sans serif, serif, and sans-serif monospaced, the project now has experimental sans condensed and serif condensed families. The project's wiki-based site provides excellent documentation, including the project's roadmap for Multilingual European Subset MES conformance and current and future plans.
Nepali Fonts are the second choice when it comes to typing in Nepali or Devanagari. Since, Nepali Unicode began gaining popularity; fonts are no longer used by most Unicode Nepali Converter Click here for the old version. Select All Text. Preeti to Unicode Preeti to Unicode - This preeti to unicode converter converts tradational nepali font preeti to unicode, which is widely used in email and internet. Before the popularity of Unicode, typing in Devanagari used to be done in various fonts.
Preeti is one of the most popular fonts used to type in Nepali. Typing Romanized Nepali Words in above box will be converted into Nepali for e.
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