[docbook-apps] Alternatives to MS Arial Unicode for PDF output?
As has been noted on this list, the MS Arial Unicode font is not freely downloadable. For example, from last year: From: Ron Catterall r...@catterall.net Date: June 7, 2010 10:06:34 AM CDT To: Bob Stayton b...@sagehill.net, docbook-apps docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] Font problem - need 2 font files in Docbook Reply-To: r...@catterall.net ... A trivial point, http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/SpecialChars.html#fontFamilyList includes the Arial Unicode MS font can be downloaded for free. but: On 2005-04-11, Ascender Corporation announced it had entered an agreement with Microsoft which enables Ascender to distribute Microsoft fonts, including the Windows Core Fonts, the Microsoft Web Fonts and the many multilingual fonts currently supplied by Microsoft. Called Arial Unicode, it is sold for approximately $99 per 5 users. The font is also apparently licensed to Apple, who announced on October 16, 2007 that Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard), would be bundled with Arial Unicode. Unfortunately I'm still on 10.4.11 Also I've been unable to find 'yogh' in the Ascender Arial fontset. This font was useful for fop, to produce PDFs of documents containing, for example, Chinese or Japanese characters. How are people dealing with the licensing issue noted above? Are there other freely-available Unicode fonts offering complete character support? Or have people chosen to deal with Ascender (which has been bought by monotypeimaging.com in the meantime)? Are they reasonable to deal with? Do they supply font information in a form that's fop-usable? (I did search the mailing list archives but didn't see an answer. Apologies if this has been answered already, a pointer would be appreciated.) Thanks. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: docbook-apps-unsubscr...@lists.oasis-open.org For additional commands, e-mail: docbook-apps-h...@lists.oasis-open.org
Re: [docbook-apps] Alternatives to MS Arial Unicode for PDF output?
Paul, We use DejaVu fonts that are freely available from _http://dejavu-fonts.org/_ (http://dejavu-fonts.org/) They have several unicode fonts that incorporate almost all of the unicode sets. I have found them very clean and they are continually maintained as well. Regards, Dean Nelson In a message dated 7/8/2011 8:05:04 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, p...@kitebird.com writes: As has been noted on this list, the MS Arial Unicode font is not freely downloadable. For example, from last year: From: Ron Catterall r...@catterall.net Date: June 7, 2010 10:06:34 AM CDT To: Bob Stayton b...@sagehill.net, docbook-apps docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] Font problem - need 2 font files in Docbook Reply-To: r...@catterall.net ... A trivial point, http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/SpecialChars.html#fontFamilyList includes the Arial Unicode MS font can be downloaded for free. but: On 2005-04-11, Ascender Corporation announced it had entered an agreement with Microsoft which enables Ascender to distribute Microsoft fonts, including the Windows Core Fonts, the Microsoft Web Fonts and the many multilingual fonts currently supplied by Microsoft. Called Arial Unicode, it is sold for approximately $99 per 5 users. The font is also apparently licensed to Apple, who announced on October 16, 2007 that Mac OS X v10.5 (Leopard), would be bundled with Arial Unicode. Unfortunately I'm still on 10.4.11 Also I've been unable to find 'yogh' in the Ascender Arial fontset. This font was useful for fop, to produce PDFs of documents containing, for example, Chinese or Japanese characters. How are people dealing with the licensing issue noted above? Are there other freely-available Unicode fonts offering complete character support? Or have people chosen to deal with Ascender (which has been bought by monotypeimaging.com in the meantime)? Are they reasonable to deal with? Do they supply font information in a form that's fop-usable? (I did search the mailing list archives but didn't see an answer. Apologies if this has been answered already, a pointer would be appreciated.) Thanks. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: docbook-apps-unsubscr...@lists.oasis-open.org For additional commands, e-mail: docbook-apps-h...@lists.oasis-open.org
Re: [docbook-apps] Alternatives to MS Arial Unicode for PDF output?
On Fri, 8 Jul 2011 12:05:56 EDT, deannel...@aol.com wrote: We use DejaVu fonts that are freely available from _http://dejavu-fonts.org/_ (http://dejavu-fonts.org/) They have several unicode fonts that incorporate almost all of the unicode sets. ... From: Ron Catterall r...@catterall.net ... the Arial Unicode MS font can be downloaded for free. ... This font was useful for fop, to produce PDFs of documents containing, for example, Chinese or Japanese characters. AFAIK, the DejaVu fonts don't include any CJK characters. In fact, there are few if any fonts that cover the entire Unicode range, or even most of it. (The only one I know of simply puts up a box containing the code point of the character--not any glyphs for the character.) And once you get beyond Latin or Cyrillic characters, many of the character sets place extraordinary demands on the rendering system. Arabic scripts are connected, and the Nasta'liq versions of Arabic scripts even more so; glyphs flip over preceding glyphs in many Indic languages, or show up on both the left and the right of a preceding glyph; and so on. It's hard to find a good font for any one such script, much less a font that covers all or most of them. That said, you can look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_typefaces I think the right solution is to use multiple fonts for a document that contains multiple scripts. We have that problem with multilingual documents, and it's reasonably (not completely) straightforward to tag sequences of characters in this or that Unicode block for the font that they should use. (The tags will be dependent on your typesetting system, of course.) Mike Maxwell - To unsubscribe, e-mail: docbook-apps-unsubscr...@lists.oasis-open.org For additional commands, e-mail: docbook-apps-h...@lists.oasis-open.org
