[Openfontlibrary] [Gentium] Update #5 - Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic available for testing

Fri Nov 16 05:38:50 PST 2007

Alexandre and others -

I hope all of you who are interested in the Gentium fonts are on our
gentium-announce list. But in case you're not, here is what I send to the
list yesterday. I would appreciate any and all feedback on the new test
fonts. Thanks!

Victor Gaultney

---------------------

Gentium-Announce List
Update #5 - Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic available for testing
- - - - - - - -

Dear friends of Gentium,

Great news! We have been hard at work to complete the first versions of
Gentium that include bold and bold italic. For the first time in many years
we have a major release for you - in a preliminary test version.

We have two new font families in the Gentium clan: Gentium Basic and Gentium
Book Basic. Each has a complete set of four weights: regular, italic, bold
and bold italic. Gentium Book Basic is generally heavier than the original
Gentium and better for some publishing uses. Both families also include a
few OpenType and Graphite smart font features, including optimized diacritic
positioning. I've appended parts of the Gentium Basic FONTLOG below to give
you more detailed information on these fonts.

The new fonts are called 'Basic' because they support a smaller set of
characters than the full Gentium fonts. They only support basic Latin and a
handful of extended Latin characters. There is no Greek or Cyrillic, or even
full IPA. The purpose is to provide early versions of the new weights that
meet the needs of most Latin script users.

Never fear - we haven't abandoned the main Gentium fonts. Our next task will
be to return to them and complete an update of the existing regular and
italic to add extended Cyrillic, ancient Greek glyphs, Unicode 5.1 updates,
and smart font capabilities. We'd hoped to have this completed by now, but
wanted to get the new weights to you as soon as we could. After that we plan
to expand the main Gentium family to include these new weights and smart
font code.

The new Basic fonts are only available in beta test right now. They contain
known bugs, so we don't yet recommend them for everyday production use, or
as the source for derivative versions. The most serious one is that the
lowercase 'z' has too much space in the heavier italic weights. We plan to
release a fixed, final release of the Basic fonts in a month or two, once
initial broad testing is done. So we welcome your bug reports and general
opinions on the design of the heavier faces.

The beta test fonts are available at:

    http://scripts.sil.org/Gentium_basic

A few requests:

- please note the limitations and known problems
- please do not ask us to expand the Basic character set, as those needs
will be met by the complete Gentium font family
- please report problems to me at the email address below, not via the
download feedback form on the main Gentium download page

Thanks again for your interest in Gentium, and the many encouraging emails
you have sent.

Victor Gaultney
Gentium /at/ sil.org

==========================================================
FONTLOG
Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic  v1.1b1 (test release)
==========================================================

This file provides detailed information on the Gentium Basic and Gentium
Book Basic font families. This information should be distributed along with
the Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts and any derivative works.

NOTE: These fonts are intended only for preliminary testing, as they contain
bugs. Many aspects of the fonts, including glyph metrics, may change before
the final release.

Basic Font Information
----------------------

Gentium ("belonging to the nations" in Latin) is a Unicode typeface family
designed to enable the many diverse ethnic groups around the world who use
the Latin script to produce readable, high-quality publications. The design
is intended to be highly readable, reasonably compact, and visually
attractive. Gentium has won a "Certificate of Excellence in Typeface Design"
in two major international typeface design competitions: bukva:raz! (2001),
TDC2003 (2003).

The Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic font families are based on the
original design, but with additional weights. The "Book" family is slightly
heavier. Both families come with a complete regular, bold, italic and bold
italic set of fonts.

The supported character set, however, is much smaller than for the main
Gentium fonts. These "Basic" fonts support only the Basic Latin and Latin-1
Supplement Unicode ranges, plus a selection of the more commonly used
extended Latin characters, with miscellaneous diacritical marks, symbols and
punctuation. For a complete list of supported characters see the list at the
end of this document.

In particular, these fonts do not support:

- Full extended Latin IPA
- Complete support for Central European languages
- Greek
- Cyrillic
- Any SIL PUA characters (although note that some previously PUA are now in
Unicode 5.1, and included)

A much more complete character set will be supported in a future version of
the complete Gentium fonts. These "Basic" fonts are intended as a way to
provide additional weights for basic font users without waiting until the
complete Gentium character set is finished. So please don't request
additional glyphs or characters to be supported in the Basic fonts - such
support will become available in the main Gentium family in the future.

There are also some other limitations of the Basic fonts:

- They are not completely metric-compatible with the full Gentium family
  (some glyphs may have different widths, although changes have been
minimal)
- There is no kerning
- There are no "Alt" versions, or ones with low-profile diacritics
- The default stacking style for some diacritic combinations does not match
Vietnamese-style conventions (although this may change in the final release)

There are, however, some wonderful new features that are still missing from
the main Gentium family:

- Bold!
- Bold Italic!
- The slightly-heavier Book family!
- OpenType and Graphite smart code for diacritic placement!
- A few useful OpenType and Graphite features
- Support for a few more recent additions to Unicode
- Character assignments are updated to conform to Unicode 5.1

In particular, the Basic fonts support a subset of the smart font features
that the Doulos SIL font supports. Those features are:

- Capital Eng alternates
- Literacy alternates
- Capital Y-hook alternate
- Capital N-left-hook alternate
- Modifier apostrophe alternate
- Modifier colon alternate
- Open o alternate
- Vietnamese-style diacritics

More detail on the features can be seen in the Doulos SIL Technical
Documentation (link:http://scripts.sil.org/DoulosSIL_Technical).

Known Problems
--------------

We know of the following problems with this test release, all of which will
be fixed in the final release. Please report any other problems you
encounter.

- The spacing of lowercase 'z' and related composites is much too wide in
three faces: Gentium Basic Bold Italic, Gentium Book Basic Italic, Gentium
Book Basic Bold Italic. That's enough reason to avoid using this test
release in production enviroments!
- The width of the space glyph in those same three fonts is too wide and
will be reduced.
- Capital and lowercase barred-o have dropouts due to overlapping contours.
- The cedilla, ogonek and hook diacritics do not combine correctly with base
glyphs when using Graphite rendering.
- The sizes of the capital and lowercase saltillo are incorrect.
- Cursors may not slant correctly for italic fonts.
- No TypeTuner support.

ChangeLog
---------
(This should list both major and minor changes, most recent first.)

12 Nov 2007 (Victor Gaultney)  Gentium Basic/Gentium Book Basic version
1.1b1
- trimmed character set down to Basic
- added additional weights
- no FontLab source files

28 Nov 2005 (Victor Gaultney)  Gentium version 1.02
- Changed licensing to the SIL Open Font License
- Included FontLab source files
- Fixed some duplicate PostScript glyphs names
- Fixed italic angle

19 Sep 2003 (Victor Gaultney)  Gentium version 1.01
- Maintenance release focused on changing internal font
- Information to reflect the changeover to an SIL project
- There is only one bug fix - the Greek mu PS name was changed to try and
fix a display/printing problem. There is still no manual hinting

16 Sep 2002 (Victor Gaultney)  Gentium version 1.00
- First public release
- No manual hinting is included in this version. Some has been done - with
good results - but is not yet complete enough.

Information for Contributors
----------------------------

We currently do not encourage contributions - or derivative works - at
present as there are significant bugs in these test fonts and many things
may and will change.

Acknowledgements
----------------
(Here is where contributors can be acknowledged. If you make modifications
be sure to add your name (N), email (E), web-address (W) and description
(D). This list is sorted by last name in alphabetical order.)

N: Victor Gaultney
W: http://www.sil.org/~gaultney/
D: Original Designer of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic glyphs

N: Annie Olsen
W: http://scripts.sil.org/
D: Contributed some extended Latin glyphs

N: SIL font engineers
W: http://scripts.sil.org/
D: OpenType code and build support

The Gentium project, and the Gentium Basic and Gentium Book Basic fonts, are
maintained by SIL International.

For more information please visit the Gentium page on SIL International's
Computers and Writing systems website:
http://scripts.sil.org/gentium

Or send an email to <gentium AT sil DOT org>

Character Range Coverage
------------------------

C0 Controls and Basic Latin (U+0020..U+007E)
C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement (U+00A0..U+00FF)
Latin Extended-A (U+0100..U+0103, U+0106..U+010E, U+011A..U+0121,
U+0124..U+0125, U+0128..U+012D, U+0130..U+0133, U+0139..U+013A,
U+0141..U+0144, U+0147..U+0148, U+014A..U+0155, U+0158..U+015D,
U+0160..U+0161, U+0164, U+0168..U+0171, U+00174..U+017E)
Latin Extended-B (U+0181, U+0186, U+0189..U+018A, U+018E, U+0190, U+0192,
U+0197..U+019A, U+019D, U+019F..U+01A1, U+01A9..U+01AA, U+01AF..U+01B0,
U+01B3..U+01B4, U+01B7, U+01CD..U+01E3, U+01E6..U+01E9, U+01EE..U+01EF,
U+01F4..U+01F5, U+01F8..U+01FF, U+021E..U+021F, U+0226..U+0233, U+0237,
U+023D, U+0241..U+0242, U+0244..U+0245, U+024A..U+024B)
IPA Extensions (U+0251, U+0253..U+0254, U+0256..U+0257, U+0259, U+025B,
U+0263, U+0268..U+0269, U+026B, U+0272, U+0275, U+0283, U+0289..U+028A,
U+028C, U+0292, U+0294, U+02A0)
Spacing Modifier Letters (U+02BC, U+02C0, U+02C6..U+02C7, U+02C9..U+02CB,
U+02CD, U+02D7..U+02DD)
Combining Diacritical Marks (U+0300..U+0304,U+0306..U+030C, U+031B, U+0323,
U+0327..U+0328, U+0331, U+033F, U+035F)
Greek and Coptic (U+03A0, U+03A9, U+03C0)
Latin Extended Additional (U+1E02..U+1E0F, U+1E14..U+1E17, U+1E1C..U+1E27,
U+1E2E..U+1E3B, U+1E3E..U+1E49, U+1E4C..U+1E6F, U+1E78..U+1E99,
U+1EA0..U+1EF9)
General Punctuation (U+2013..U+2014, U+2018..U+201A, U+201C..U+201E,
U+2020..U+2022, U+2026, U+2030, U+2039..U+203A, U+2044)
Currency Symbols (U+20AC)
Letterlike Symbols (U+2122..U+2123, U+2126)
Mathematical Operators (U+2202, U+2205..U+2206, U+220F, U+2211..U+2212,
U+2219..U+221A, U+221E, U+222B, U+2248, U+2260, U+2264..U+2265)
Geometric Shapes (U+25CA)
Latin Extended-C (U+2C60..U+2C62)
Modifier Tone Letters (U+A700..U+A71A)
Latin Extended-D (U+A789..U+A78C)
Alphabetic Presentation Forms (U+FB01..U+FB02)