Free letters software for linux

Linux Letters and Numbers project is an educational childrens game for linux.
Linux Letters and Number is a fun and educational learning game intended for children 2 and up.
It helps children learn or improve their letters, numbers, spelling, and vocabulary skills through the use of interesting pictures.
It also helps them develop important computer skills too.
It is written in C using the GTK and GDK_Imlib libraries.
Main features:
- Extensible - add new images yourself without having to make changes to the program. With support for gdk_imlib, you can now use common image formats, including common formats like gif, jpeg, xpm, png, and tiff.
- Dynamic - each letter or number can be represented by numerous pictures, each being displayed randomly.
- Flexible - you can even have more than one picture for a given word, by using a simple versioning scheme (ie Apple.1.xpm, Apple.2.xpm)
- Interesting - because you can change the game, its different every time!

Lexter is a real-time word puzzle for text terminals. Arrange the falling letters into words to score points. Lexter supports internationalization and multiple dictionaries. The package contains English and French dictionaries, but needs a French gettext translation for the in game text.

If anyone would like to translate Lexter to another language Ill include any "po" files I receive in the next version.

Lexter project dynamically calculates word scores from the dictionary contents. The format is plain text with one "word" per line and can contain just about anything. They could be topical like place names or even famous number sequences. Although it might make for a very difficult game.

The Lexter archive also includes an RPM spec file. RPM users can build a binary package ready to install by running:

rpm -tb lexter-1.0.3.tar.gz

You will find the binary rpm under /usr/src/rpm/RPMS/i386 or /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386.

LaTeXDB project brings together LaTeX and a MySQL database. You can use SQL queries in your LaTeX document and loop over the result sets creating tables, serial letters, and other stuff.
LaTeXDB is pretty simple to use, there are only three new commands to extend your LaTeX files: With them you define a database connection, create queries and access the result sets.
You include commands such as
texdbconnection{DBType,host,user,passwd,db}
to setup a database connection,
texdbdef{##query}{select var1,var2,... from table where...}{##VAR1,##VAR2,...}
to define a query, and
texdbfor{##query}{... some LaTeX stuff with ##VAR1, ...}
to use the results in your LaTeX code.
Installation:
This is easy too: Grab the archive, unpack it, and run install as root, or for minimum functionality copy latexdb, latexdb.py and latexdb-preparse.py from the code directory to /usr/local/bin or some other directory that can be found in $PATH. Only put them in the same directory, because latexdb expects latexdb.py and latexdb-preparse.py in its own directory.
Enhancements:
- A bug within the preparser that caused latexdb to break in texdbfor loops with too big arguments was fixed (contributed by Francois Meyer)
- New script pdflatexdb which is the same as latexdb but calls pdflatex instead of latex, so it generates PDF, not DVI files (user request)

Gentium is a typeface family designed to enable the diverse ethnic groups around the world who use the Latin script to produce readable, high-quality publications.

Gentium fonts project supports a wide range of Latin-based alphabets and includes glyphs that correspond to all the Latin ranges of Unicode.

The design is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually attractive. The additional "extended" Latin letters are designed to naturally harmonize with the traditional 26 ones. Diacritics are treated with careful thought and attention to their use.

Gentium also supports both ancient and modern Greek, including a number of alternate forms. These fonts were originally the product of two years of research and study by the designer at the University of Reading, England, as part of an MA program in Typeface Design.

SIL International has now embraced the Gentium project, and plans to continue development. Expansion of the glyph set to include more extended Latin glyphs, archaic Greek symbols, and full Cyrillic script support is the next step. Work on this has already begun, but the results will not be available for a few months. Addition of bold and bold italic faces will follow.

Gentium is freely available and may be used by anyone at no cost. It is now released under the SIL Open Font License, a free and open source license that permits modification and redistribution.

Our hope is that it will stimulate literature production and elevate extended Latin alphabets to greater parity with the basic Latin alphabet. We also hope it will encourage other type designers to appreciate and support those fascinating and beautiful extra letters.

Acme::EyeDrops is a Perl module for visual programming in Perl.

SYNOPSIS

use Acme::EyeDrops qw(sightly);

print sightly( { Shape => camel,
SourceFile => eyesore.pl } );

Acme::EyeDrops converts a Perl program into an equivalent one, but without all those unsightly letters and numbers.

In a Visual Programming breakthrough, EyeDrops allows you to pour the generated program into various shapes, such as UML diagrams, enabling you to instantly understand how the program works just by glancing at its new and improved visual representation.

Unlike Acme::Bleach and Acme::Buffy, the generated program runs without requiring that Acme::EyeDrops be installed on the target system.

EXAMPLES

Getting Started

Suppose you have a program, helloworld.pl, consisting of:

print "hello worldn";

To convert this little program into an equivalent camel-shaped one, create cvt.pl as follows:

# cvt.pl. Convert helloworld.pl into a camel shape.
use Acme::EyeDrops qw(sightly);
print sightly( { Shape => camel,
SourceFile => helloworld.pl,
Regex => 1 } );

Then run it like this:

perl cvt.pl >new.pl

After inspecting the newly created program, new.pl, to verify that it does indeed resemble a camel, run it:

perl new.pl

to confirm it behaves identically to the original helloworld.pl.

Instead of using the API, as shown above, you may find it more convenient to use the sightly.pl command in the demo directory:

sightly.pl -h (for help)
sightly.pl -s camel -f helloworld.pl -r >new.pl
cat new.pl (should look like a camel)
perl new.pl (should print "hello world" as before)

Notice that the shape camel is just the file camel.eye in the EyeDrops sub-directory underneath where EyeDrops.pm is located, so you are free to add your own new shapes as required.

For the meaning of Regex => 1 above, see the Just another Perl hacker section below.

Lingua::EO::Supersignoj is a Perl module that can convert Esperanto characters.

SYNOPSIS

use Lingua::EO::Supersignoj;

my $transkodigilo = Lingua::EO::Supersignoj->nova(
de => fronte,
al => X,
u => u*
);
print $transkodigilo->transkodigu(Mia ^suoj estas ankau* en la ^cambro.);
# prints: Mia sxuoj estas ankaux en la cxambro.

my $transkodigilo = Lingua::EO::Supersignoj->nova(de => X);

for (qw(X x H h poste fronte apostrofoj iso unikodo)) {
$transkodigilo->al = $_;
print $transkodigilo->transkodigu(
Laux Ludoviko Zamenhof bongustas .
fresxa cxecxa mangxajxo kun spicoj.
);
}

Esperanto has 6 letters that ASCII doesnt have. These characters do exist in Unicode and ISO-8859-3. This object orientated module makes conversion easier.

Sigma Consolefonts package contains a set of UTF-8 fonts which provide readability and wide coverage. Actually, it is only one font, in an 8x16 size but with a number of variations of what gets mapped into the (psfu) consolefont. If you arent using Linux and a UTF-8 locale, this probably will not have any relevance to you.

Still interested ? Ok, here is a less than wonderful photograph of what the sigma-general version of this font can do. Apologies for the poor quality of the photo, I hope you can get an idea of what this does - and if you are using the linux console without a graphical desktop, youll just have to download it to try it out.

I aim to let people see as many characters as possible on their console. I know that most people assume a graphical desktop is necessary to see a wide range of characters, but the standard console can display 512 characters if you do without the bold colours.

Traditional console fonts have often used separate glyphs for cyrillic and latin letters of the same shape, but desktop fonts normally render them identically (e.g. latin A and cyrillic А), and so do I - this helps make some space available. I have used Dmitry Bolkhovityanovs perl script to select which glyphs are used in a particular psfu font, and to map multiple codepoints to the same glyph. There are a limited range of line-drawing characters (enough to give a decent display in the linux kernels make menuconfig).
The main use of these fonts is when you dont have a graphical desktop but still want to be able to read text in many languages. So, perhaps they are most appropriate to people running servers. For myself, they let me read my mail over ssh when I am building the graphical desktop for a new system.

The font itself started out as etl16 from one of the debian console packages. I altered it to give more balanced letters - longer descenders at the expense of less space above the letters, and bringing the accents closer to the letter. The cell format of a capital letter is 3 rows above the letter, 10 rows for the letter, and another 3 rows for the descender. In hex, that is 3A3, hence the name (U+03A3 is Σ).

Unlike traditional vga fonts hard-coded into the machine, these fonts are much less bright - you may have to increase your screens brightness. This is because they are thin (normally only one pixel wide). The 8x16 size is very much "one size fits all" - adequate for most accented latin, and for cyrillic and current greek, but not ideal where there are multiple accents (livonian, vietnamese, polytonic greek).
Unlike most other console fonts, these come with the source (a bdf font) and a series of map files to decide what to include. So, if you really dislike the form of one of the letters you can alter it - the bdf is just 16 lines of hex codes, e.g. a capital U has nine lines of x42 (0100 0010) and a baseline of x3C (0011 1100).

If you want to change a map, either to add something else, or to remove something you dont use, they are simple to edit.
The linux console cannot accomodate CJK languages, so this font is for people who use alphabetic languages. The armenian and georgian glyphs should be identical to what is in etl16, also the arabic and hebrew (and I really dont know how useful those are on a left-to-right terminal). Everything else has been tweaked to provide what I think is a satisfactory result.

The tarball includes my attempt at listing the alphabets for the languages covered - to answer the question, which glyphs do you need for a particular language. These files may also be useful if you are using xorg and want to check whether your fonts provide adequate coverage.

For most people, I think the general version should work well (latin, greek and the main european cyrillic letters). Some people may prefer the cyrillic variant (all current cyrillic, greek, some latin letters. There is also a caucasian variant (latin, cyrillic, armenian, georgian) and some other example and proof-of-concept variants, e.g. african, polytonic, vietnamese. Ultimately, the african languages are limited by a lack of precomposed glyphs in unicode (AFAIK, there is a lack of terminals which support combining diacriticals), but some languages such as venda should work. Languages with multiple accents above the letter (livonian, polytonic greek, vietnamese) are not wonderful in the 8x16 size, but they might suffice.