Free dejavu fonts software for linux

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)

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.

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.

GNU font utilities to allow conversion of a scanned type specimen image into an outline (PostScript or Metafont) font. These fonts can be used with Ghostscript or TeX.
Since the fontutils were originally written in the early 1990s, other programs have been developed which do a better job of some parts of this task. Here is a list of the fontutils programs with indications of their current status:
- imgrotate: rotates images 90 degrees, an inefficiently-implemented subset of pnmrotate (from netpbm).
- imageto: extracts individual characters from a large image; still useful.
- fontconvert: some features may still be useful, such as creating a tfm file from a bitmap.
- charspace: allows non-interactive side bearing specification, so possibly still useful. On the other hand, fontforge allows interactive specification, and has a very nice preview window for testing side bearings.
- gsrenderfont: a shell script that converts outline fonts to bitmaps at a given size. This is called from TeX programs under certain circumstances. The version here has long been replaced by the scripts in the TeX distributions.
- limn: does the actual conversion from bitmaps to splines. These days, youre much better off using autotrace or potrace.
- bzrto: conversion from the generic homegrown `bzr (Bezier) format output by limn to PostScript Type 1, PostScript Type 3, or Metafont. Obsolete.
- bpltobzr: translate the binary bzr format into an equivalent text format `bpl (bezier property list), for editing. Fortunately, a full-featured free outline font editor, fontforge, has been written (by George Williams).
- xbfe: bitmap font editor for shapes and metrics; astonishingly, it seems there are still no bitmap editors for any format except BDF, so still useful.

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.

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.

fonty-rg project is a set of fonts for the Linux console.

LatCyrGr-16.psf is font containing most of ISO Latin characters, lot of cyrillic chars, lot of greek chars, and some punctuation. It is good for unicode linux console. This is 512 character font, means that you loose bold colour on linux console, unless you are using framebuffer.

chavo.psf is font containing lot of ISO-8859-2 repertoire, some additional ISO-8859-1 characters, Russian cyrillic characters and special Esperanto characters. It was specifically created to cover Czech, Slovak, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, German, Esperanto. Of course, it accidentally covers much wider range.

Good as a console font if you want to retain bold colours (and do not need some ISO-8859-1 characters - there was simply not enough space for them).

Usage

To build fonts: run build.sh script.
To modify fonts: edit files in source/ directory.
To add new charsets: add *.txt file into charsets/ directory.

To use fonts: there are two small scripts provided, iso and uni.
iso takes as an argument number of ISO-8859 encoding, switching console font into font for that encoding, and uni switches console into unicode mode, using big unicode font. See manpages for details.

Extended Borders for Photos is an extension of the simpler border+copyright script, but can be a bit more complex.

It allows you to add double borders, add copyright notice and title, as well as decide fonts, font-sizes and positions of the title and copyright notice.

Support for blurring the copyright and title is also included. Update to 1.5 fixes upgrade to Gimp 2.2 problem.