4.0224 Non-Roman Fonts (forwarded from comp.fonts) (1/285)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Tue, 26 Jun 90 18:10:19 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 0224. Tuesday, 26 Jun 1990.

Date: Mon, 25 Jun 90 16:20:20 MDT
Subject: Non-Roman Fonts (Forwarded from comp.fonts)
From: koontz@alpha.bldr.nist.gov (John E. Koontz)
Original Sender: scott@sage.uchicago.edu (Scott Deerwester)

The following on non-Roman fonts may be of interest to Humanist
subscribers. It was posted on USENET's comp.fonts by Scott Deerwester.

Forwarded message follows:
-----------------

A month or so ago I asked for information on non-roman fonts. The
list that I asked about was:

Arabic Chinese Gujarati Korean Pollard
Armenian Cyrillic Gurmukhi Lao Sinhala
Batak Devanagari Hebrew Latin Tamil
Bengali Ethiopic Japanese Malayalam Thai
Burmese Georgian Javanese Mongolian Tibetan
Cambodian Greek Kannada Oriya

I've heard back about several sources of fonts, and here is a summary
of what I've heard. Thanks to all who gave me information. I will
update this list if there appears to be a need to. This list makes no
attempt at all to include things that are written with a varient of
the Roman alphabet. This explicitly includes Vietnamese, Turkish,
Polish, Icelandic and any other scripts that are basically Latin, but
with extra characters. It's not that I don't care about those, it's
just that that's not the point of this survey.

First, there are several kinds of fonts;

- MetaFont source, suitable for use with TeX
- BDF (X Windows) fonts
- Stroked PostScript (usually called "Laser") fonts
- Macintosh screen fonts
- SUN NeWS fonts

My posting said that I was interested in PostScript, but I heard back
about a number of kinds of fonts. The remainder of this posting is
divided into two sections. The first section lists sources of fonts,
with an indication of what they have. There are two kinds of sources
of fonts; ftp sites and companies. I've tried to indicate price for
companies. The second section is listed by script.

*** I do not have any connection with any of these sources of fonts,
*** and inclusion in this list does not constitute endorsement.

I. Sources of fonts

A. Commercial Macintosh and PostScript fonts

1. Linguist's Software

Address: PO Box 508, Edmonds, WA 98020-0580
Telephone: (206) 775-1130
Fax: (206) 771-5911

This is arguably the best single source of non-Roman fonts. Most of
the Mac fonts are $79.95. The "MacSEMITIC COPTIC DEVANAGARI" package,
which is also $79.97, includes everything between Coptic and
Devanagari in the following list.

Macintosh fonts:
Gujarati, Punjabi (Gurmukhi), Tamil, Burmese, Armenian, Georgian,
Kanji (Japanese), Chinese, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac (Nestorian,
Jacobite and Estrangelo), Ethiopic, Ugaritic, Sabean, Devanagari,
Hieroglyphics, Akkadian, Sanskrit, Greek, Cyrillic

Laser fonts are between $99.95 (why don't they just say $100?) and
$149.95.

"Laser" (PostScript) fonts:
Cyrillic, Hieroglyphics*, Greek, Tibetan, Hebrew, Thai (8
typefaces), Extended Latin

2. Ecological Linguistics

Address: PO Box 15156, Washington, DC, 20003

>From one of the blurbs; "Complex alphabets smoothly integrated on the
Macintosh." They concentrate on things like "almost automatic"
transliteration, keyboard interpreters, switching fonts easily, and
cheap prices. The licensing is for "any number of users on a single
terminal (one user at a time)." They also have a lot of fonts which
have some alphabet plus Times.

Macintosh fonts:
Amharic (Ethiopic), Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Burmese (Mon, Shan
also available as additions), Cambodian, Cyrillic, Cham, Cherokee
(Cree, Inuktitut, Pollard syllabic), Chess, Bopomofo (if you don't
know, don't ask), Devanagari, Hieroglyphics, Georgian (plus Old
Georgian), Greek, Gujarati, Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Hebrew, IPA,
Katakana (Japanese syllabic), Kharosthii, Korean, Laotian,
Malayalam, Mayan Hieroglyphs (plus a Mayan calendar calculator!),
Mideastern Syllabaries (Mycenean, Cypros, Paphos, CyproMinoan,
Ugarit), Mongolian, Mycenean, Oriya, Sinhalese (4 typefaces),
Tamil, Telugu, Thai (22 typefaces!), Tibetan.

PostScript fonts:
Greek, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Thai,
Amharic, Arabic, Hebrew

He (Ecological Linguistics is a "he") also sells script managers, etc.
Prices are mostly $50 for Mac fonts (on a system disk) and $90-$120
for PostScript fonts.

3. Pacific Rim Connections, Inc.

Address: 3030 Atwater Drive, Burlingame, CA 94010
Telephone: (415) 697-0911
Fax: (415) 697-9439

They sell a lot of Asian language software for Macintoshen and PC
compatibles. If you're interested in Chinese, Japanese or Korean word
processing on the Mac or IBM PC, write to them for a catalog. I'm
not, so I didn't include the information here. They also second-
source a number of Linguist's Software's fonts, for the same price.
Worth contacting if you want to know about the software.

4. NeoScribe International

Address: PO Box 410, Clinton, NY 13323
Telephone: (315) 853-4427
Email: neoscribe%applelink@apple.com

They sell a PostScript Devanagari, Hebrew, Arabic and some other
fonts. They also do custom font design for non-Roman scripts if
you're desperate and can pay. Michael Ross, the President of
Neoscribe, seemed very knowledgeable and helpful, even though they
don't have a large inventory of fonts.

5. Bitstream

Address: 215 First Street, Cambridge MA 02142-1270
Telephone: (800) 237-3335

Bitstream claims to have "over 1,000" typefaces. According to a
TUGBoat article, this includes Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Gujarati,
Hebrew, Laotian and Tai Dam. Unfortunately, none of these is
available except to OEM's. If you're an OEM, maybe they'll talk to
you. They sent me a letter entitled, "Dear Macintosh User." Oh,
well.

6. Publishing Solutions

Telephone: (301) 424-3942

They allegedly have a lot of fonts, but I have not yet received any
literature from them in response to a phone call. They *did*,
however, answer the phone, which is more that some other companies
managed!

B. Public Macintosh fonts

There is a collection of Mac fonts at doc.cso.uiuc.edu
(128.174.73.30). They've got fonts for Polish, Russian, Czech,
Ukranian, German, Greek, Armenian, Yiddish, Georgian, Bengali,
Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Devanagari, and Tamil. The fonts
vary a lot in quality, as you would guess. There's also an IPA font
and some sillier things like Elvish.

C. Metafont

1. Survey

Dominik Wujastyk (wujastyk@euclid.ucl.ac.uk) wrote an article in
TUGBoat, v. 9 (1988), no. 2, entitled, "The Many Faces of TeX: A
Survey of Digital MetaFonts." He listed fonts in:

Devanagari, Tamil, Telugu, Arabic/Farsi, Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic,
Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, IPA

and various other things.

2. RussTeX

A note from Dimitri Vulis says:

I am the 'administrator' of RusTeX-L, the mailing list for Russian
text processing (mostly TeX-oriented). We have METAFONT for Cyrillic
(Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, et al), and we're planning to extend it
to support Uzbek, Azeri, etc (Cyrillic-based with extra letters). You
might be interested to browse through the list archives and files on
LISTSERV@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU in filelist RUSTEX-L (of course). There
are also pointers to PostScript and (raster) HP fonts.

3. Washington

A number of Metafont fonts are available from ymir.claremont.edu in
directory [anonymous.tex.babel]. This archive is maintained by Don
Hosek (dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu).

D. NeWS

Standard NeWS sites have fonts in Kanji, Cyrillic, Coptic and Elvish.
These can be convered using NeWS utilities to fonts that are usable in
X, but I haven't done so.

II. Sources of Fonts by Script

Sources:
1. Linguist's Software 2. Ecological Linguistics
3. doc.cso.uiuc.edu 4. Pacific Rim Connections
5. ymir.claremont.edu 6. X distribution
7. Neoscribe 8. Wujastyk article
9. Bitstream

PostScript Mac X TeX
Arabic 1, 2 1, 2
Armenian 1, 2 1, 2, 3
Batak
Bengali 2 2, 3
Burmese 1, 2
Cambodian 1
Chinese 1, 4 5
Cyrillic 1, 2 1, 2, 3 6 5
Devanagari 2 1, 2, 3 8
Ethiopic 2 1, 2
Georgian 1, 2, 3
Greek 1, 2 1, 2, 3 6 5, 8
Gujarati 1, 2
Gurmukhi 1, 2
Hebrew 1, 2, 7 1, 2 5, 8
Japanese 1, 2, 4
Javanese
Kannada
Korean 1, 4 1, 3, 4
Lao 2
Malayalam 2 2
Mongolian 2
Oriya 2
Pollard 1
Sinhala 2
Tamil 2 1, 2, 3 8
Thai 1, 2 1, 2, 3
Tibetan 1 1, 2

III. Odds and Ends

A. Hanzi

A package called Hanzi is available that allows manipulation of files
in Chinese in a format called HZ. It comes with a relatively complete
PD set of Chinese (raster) fonts in their own format, but with tools
to convert to other things. It is available from june.cs.washington.edu
in /pub/yeung, which also has a document on transcribing cantonese.

B. Chinese Metafont

==> These files are not usable with TeX or modern MetaFont <==

Go Guoan and John Hobby, now at Bell Labs, wrote a set of Chinese
fonts in *Old* Metafont. It is asserted that somebody, somewhere is
working on these being updated to Metafont, but I have not heard
anything more. These files are available by anonymous ftp from
june.cs.washington.edu. This is Pierre Mackay's home machine, which
explains a few things...

C. Here is a paragraph from an article on the net by Mark Edwards,
posted in February, 1989:

-------
This is my attempt at compiling information about output devices and
such things. What I mean by output devices are display terminals,
laser printers, and typesetters. The kinds of information that you
will find here is about typesetting, fonts, converting some type of
font to another, converting device independent files to device
dependent files, converting various ways of storing pictures to
postscript and so. I have also started a small glossary of important
or useful terms to help aide in understanding. I originally posted
parts of this list in comp.fonts and comp.text. But it has grown and
includes information that pertains to other groups now.
-------
If there is sufficient demand, perhaps Mark will post it again, or if
he doesn't mind, I'll post my copy.

D. Kterm

Here is the first paragraph of the README:

Kterm is a terminal emulator allowing to use Japanese on X11 Window
System. It is expansion of xterm and have some bugs like xterm.
Further there may be some bugs in the expanded part. If you find such
bugs, send me them please.

1989 November 18 Hiroto Kagotani
kagotani@cs.titech.ac.jp

It comes in the contrib/clients directory of the X11R4 distribution.

E. Hopefully, since this is way at the bottom of a huge posting,
nobody will see it, but (and here I switch to 6 point type) I've
collected most of what's on the net regarding non-Roman fonts, and if
there is absolutely overwhelming demand, I will make it available via
anonymous ftp from a system at the University of Chicago. Shhhh...

Scott Deerwester | Internet: scott@tira.uchicago.edu
Center for Information and | Phone: 312-702-6948
Language Studies | 1100 E. 57th, CILS
University of Chicago | Chicago, IL 60637