Free cursive fonts software for linux

6,760 Fonts is a large archive with many free fonts.
The Absolute Fonts Archive created a page that will let you download many fonts one at a time, or for a fee you can download them all as a zip file.
Upon careful inspection of their site I found a multitude of corrupted font files. After removing all the corrupted files I was left with 6,760 fonts. I have chosen to turn them into a tarball and offer them as a free download.
Absolute Fonts Archive has neither licensed nor created any of the fonts on their site, but they do warn against commercial use of these fonts.
Version restrictions:
- installing that amount of fonts really slows down the KDE startup.

The DejaVu fonts are a font family based on the Bitstream Vera Fonts release 1.10 (see the list of other Bitstream Vera derivatives or Unicode Font Guide).
DejaVu fonts purpose is to provide a wider range of characters (see Current status page for more information) while maintaining the original look and feel through the process of collaborative development (see Authors).
The family is available as TrueType fonts and also as third-party packages for various operating systems including handhelds.
Enhancements:
- fixed misplaced symbols (U+2325,2326) in Sans Oblique (by John Karp)
- added Mark to Base anchors: cedilla for combining cedilla and above-legacy for stacking above precomposed glyphs (just a,e,i,o,u with macron for now) in Sans (by Denis Jacquerye).
- added contextual substitution for Case and Dotless forms in all Sans variants (by Denis Jacquerye).
- renamed ccmp lookups for RTL and Basic (LGC, etc.) (by Denis Jacquerye)
- added anchor cedilla for vowels in Sans. (by Denis Jacquerye)
- extended contextual dotless and case substitutions to handle both below and above diacritics (by Denis Jacquerye)
- renamed Dotless and Case Form GSUB lookups in Sans with meaningful names (by Denis Jacquerye)

VSOFont is a small library used to draw very simple and fast user definable 2D vector fonts. At some point in time, when working with handheld devices, the font functions GLUT offered proved to be too massive. so i decided to write a very simple 3D vector text system using OpenGL myself. The application is coded in ANSI C.
Enhancements:
- added vsofont_read_font_from_memory().
- changed vsofont_read_font() to vsofont_read_font_from_file().
- example shows now how to draw a bolded string.
- VSOFONT header file should now work in C++ projects.
- small optimizations here and there.

FreeFont project aims to provide a set of free outline (PostScript Type0, TrueType, OpenType...) fonts covering the ISO 10646/Unicode UCS (Universal Character Set).
Why do we need free outline UCS fonts?
A large number of free software users switched from free X11 bitmapped fonts to proprietary Microsoft Truetype fonts, as a) they used to be freely downloaded from Microsoft Typography page, b) they contain a more or less decent subset of the ISO 10646 UCS (Universal Character Set), c) they are high-quality, well hinted scalable Truetype fonts, and d) Freetype, a free high-quality Truetype font renderer is available and has been integrated into the latest release of XFree86, the free X11 server.
Building a dependence on non-free software, even a niche one like fonts, is dangerous. Microsoft Truetype core fonts were never free, they were just costless. Citing the TrueType core fonts for the Web FAQ: You may only redistribute the fonts in their original form (.exe or .sit.hqx) and with their original file name from your Web site or intranet site. You must not supply the fonts, or any derivative fonts based on them, in any form that adds value to commercial products, such as CD-ROM or disk based multimedia programs, application software or utilities. As of August 2002, however, the fonts are not anymore available on the Web, which makes the situation clearer.
Dont there exist any free high-quality outline fonts? Yes, they do. URW++, a German digital typefoundry, released their own version of the 35 Postscript Type 1 core fonts under GPL as their donation to the Ghostscript project. The Wadalab Kanji comittee has produced Type 1 font files with thousands of filigree Japanese glyphs. Yannis Haralambous has drawn beautiful glyphs for the Omega typesetting system. And so on. Scattered around the internet there are numerous other free resources for other national scripts, many of them aiming to be a suitable match for Latin fonts like Times or Helvetica.
Free UCS outline fonts will cover the following character sets:
- ISO 8859 parts 1-15
- CEN MES-3 European Unicode Subset
- IBM/Microsoft code pages 437, 850, 852, 1250, 1252 and more
- Microsoft/Adobe Windows Glyph List 4 (WGL4)
- KOI8-R and KOI8-U
- DEC VT100 graphics symbols
- International Phonetic Alphabet
- Arabic, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian, Ethiopian, Thai and Lao alphabets, including Arabic presentation forms A/B
- Japanese Katakana and Hiragana
- mathematical symbols, including the whole TeX repertoire of symbols
- APL symbols etc.

Opcion Font Viewer is a free font viewer written in Java that allows you to view both installed and uninstalled TrueType fonts on Windows, Linux, Unix or Mac.
The main focus of Opcion is to allow you to view your uninstalled fonts so that you install only the fonts you want and keep your system memory free of fonts you dont want.
As you may have experienced, installing the brand new 1000 fonts font pack you just bought on your Windows, Linux, Unix or Mac computer can lead to slow-downs when starting the computer and when loading other programs.
The slow down occurs because the Operating System and certain programs (e.g. word-processors, email clients, graphics editors) need to load all system fonts so that they can be made available to you at any time. This is where Opcion comes in.
Opcion was written to handle the viewing of large font collections, therefore only fonts that you are currently viewing are stored in memory. Although the amount of physical memory you have will effect how many fonts you can view at a time, it will no longer be a limitation to you making use of your entire font library.
Another problem with most Operating Systems default font viewers is that while they are capable of viewing fonts, the default Windows/Linux/Unix font viewers only allows you to view fonts that are already installed and one at a time. Opcion allows you to view TrueType fonts located anywhere and allows you to view system fonts as well.
To help you pick the best font for the job, whether it be for your assignment, project logo or webpage, Opcion provides a list view of either system or other/uninstalled fonts so you may see how a font looks compared to other fonts in your collection.
When you see a font that you feel suits your current job you can simply click on it in the list view and it will be added to a favourites list that can then be saved for future reference or used to install only the fonts you want.
For viewing fonts, seeing how they would appear applied to your name/logo/tagline, and keeping track of which fonts best suit the job is the purpose of Opcion Font Viewer. Opcion allows you to view both installed and uninstalled fonts in different views depending on your needs. Written in Java, Opcion will work on all platforms that the Java Runtime Environment supports (which includes Windows, Mac, Solaris & Linux).
Opcion Font Viewer provdies a default view that allows you to view one font at a time, and a list view which allows you to view multiple fonts at a time. By clicking on fonts you like in the list view you are adding fonts to a faviourties list that Opcion keeps for you. The faviourites list can then be saved for future reference or used in finding out the file names of fonts you wish to install.
Main features:
- Viewing of installed/uninstalled fonts.
- List view of installed/uninstalled fonts.
- Adding/removing of favourite fonts.
- Saving of favourite fonts.
- Customizable sample/display text.
- Customizable font size.
- Customizable font properties (bold, italic, etc.) in sample text area.
- Changeable fonts displayed per page in List View.
Execute Opcion Font Viewer
To execute Opcion Font Viewer in Windows, download the EXE version. For Linux users use the command "java -jar Opcion_v1.1.1.jar" in console/terminal/shortcut.
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /usr/java/j2re1.4.1_02/lib/i386/libfontmanager.so: libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
This error occurs due to backwards compatibility issues with the Java Runtime and libstdc. To fix this problem for RedHat 9.0 install the RPM file compat-libstdc++-7.3.2.96.118.i386.rpm, which can be found on disc 1 of the downloadable distro. For other Linux distributions check rpmfind.net for libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2 to see what package you need to install.
An unexpected exception has been detected in native code outside the VM.
Unexpected Signal : 11 occurred at PC=0x4CAEE920 Function=(null)+0x4CAEE920 Library=/usr/local/lib/SunJava2-1.4.2/lib/i386/libfontmanager.so
This error appears to be a problem with Sun Microsystems Java implementation for Linux, the real cause for this crash is still being investigated. There are no solutions to this problem yet.
Opcion crashes during execution when using Blackdown Java Virtual Machine.
Opcion Font Viewer was programmed for Sun Microsystems JVM, and it uses Suns Java API extensively. Thus, it is highly recommended that you use the latest Java Runtime Environment instead of other JVMs.
Enhancements:
- Added sorting to other fonts list.

crops project helps with previewing and printing non-Latin1 characters in PostScript files.
Main features:
- perform arbitrary font remappings (substitutions) in a PostScript document
- help you print non-latin1 encoded documents, by downloading and recoding fonts

Bit-mapped Japanese font parser is a font parser. Note, this package doesnt include the actual font data. To get the font data you need to download it from the download section in the left.
Then move *.jfr into the directory where you unpacked this parser, and follow with the quick instructions.
Quick instructions:
Complete parse requires about 4 megabytes of free disk space. This is a huge improvement over the original version which required almost 45 megabytes.
1. make
2. make parse
3. watch the progress indicator
4. mv *.pcf.gz /usr/X11R/lib/X11R6/fonts/misc
5. make clean
6. HUP your font server if you use one
7. xset fp rehash
8. xlsfonts | grep kanji
/usr/X11R/lib/X11R6/fonts/misc is the standard location for all sorts of random bit-mapped fonts, but you might have a special location. Substitute that in step 4.
About:
I came across a number of these "raster fonts" a while ago. Quick look inside the files proved that they are bit-mapped fonts, and the format looked pretty straight-forward. I wrote the original parser for these just guessing the values, basically by experimenting and playing around. Later on I came across some docs on the subject - looks like these fonts were used in Windows 3.1 Japanese edition to substitute back-then low quality Japanese TTF fonts at small point sizes. These were designed using full-scale 16 bit programming techniques.
Quick info about the font format, there are some headers, then follows a "segment table" which is basically a table with pointers inside the font file where to locate a particular chunk of data. Because the 16 bit way of accessing memory is by using 65k "segments", each file is virtually split into < 65k segments which get loaded into separate memory areas, and then there is a algorithm how to assemble whatever character by using the segment number and offset. Anyway, with 32 bit access all of that doesnt really matter. In my implementation I just mmap the whole file and read it all out of memory.
Generating table.h was a LOT of work! First, I took the codearea table out of one of the jfr files (this maps shift-jis code to the character number inside the font file), and extracted the number ranges. These were shift-jis, of course, and X uses jis0208. There is no converter from a shift
jis byte into jis0208. So I had to write one. Taking iconv, and some tables from glibc 2.1.93, I hacked together something which converted the shift-jis data into ucs4 (unicode, I guess) and then from that into jis0208. The code to the converter is about 500k thanks to the huge jis->unicode->jis conversion tables, and you wont need it unless you get a jfr font with a different encoding table (unlikely). Anyway. After I got the font format figured out and converted the character table, everything else was pretty easy. Note some bit hackery in the bitmapXX() functions which was necessary to present the font data in a usable format. Also notice cool use of function pointers to select a conversion function at runtime.
Enhancements:
- This version uses correct JISX0208 tables, and is much faster.