On 26 Jan 2006, at 20:16, Gregory Pittman wrote: > It's a very attractive roman-type font.
Yes it is. I am a graduate student in linguistics and I have some more information to share. Gentium was originally created by an individual whose name I do not recall at the moment. He created only a Roman and Italic version, no bold, bold-italic or other weights. It is fully Unicode compliant and, for quite a long time, it was the only Unicode compliant font containing the majority of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) characters needed in linguistics work. A couple years ago he transferred the copyright to the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). SIL already had three fonts that they made available for free under the same terms that you mentioned. The most popular of these was Doulos. However, Doulos and the other SIL fonts were not Unicode compliant fonts. They were designed to be used with a keyboard template and to accompany another "normal" font. Doulos looks a lot like Times, so the plan was that users would use Times, and then switch to Doulos when they needed the IPA characters. The IPA characters were mapped to keys on a standard keyboard. For example, if you wanted an esh you typed a capital S. Of course, that meant that Doulos didn't have a capital S. You typed normal text in Times and entered the IPA characters by switching to Doulos and then using the keyboard template. Gentium is completely Unicode compliant, so the correct character is in each of the slots. If you type a capital S you get a capital S. If you want one of the IPA characters you figure out which Unicode character it is and enter it according to whatever your software uses for entering characters by Unicode number. This is far superior to the keyboard template workaround used in fonts like Doulos. Recently SIL made available Charis, under the same terms as their other fonts. Charis is like Gentium, that is, it is fully Unicode compliant. However, it has a bold and a bold-italic version as well. On the downside, it is not as attractive (in my opinion) as Gentium. Moreover, for some reason that I have not yet figured out, the character space is very tall, even though the actual characters are normal height. As a result you can't use tight leading, or the upper space of the characters on the line underneath will block the bottoms of the characters on the line above. I found that it works fine, however, as long as I specify a fixed leading rather than "single space," etc. One additional note. The Summer Institute of Linguistics is a Texas- based fundamentalist Christian organization which engages in linguistics activity to further their goal of translating the bible into as many languages as possible. Many people have issues with that. I state that just as a full disclosure matter, even though SIL keeps quiet on their website about it. How you deal with that is your business.
