
Unicode reencoded Knoble fonts
------------------------------

Markus Kuhn -- 2000-03-19

This package contains the 8-bit fonts by Jim Knoble
<jmknoble@pobox.com> found in

  http://www.ntrnet.net/~jmknoble/fonts/jmk-x11-fonts-3.0.tar.gz

that were reencoded by Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk> into ISO
10646-1.

Information on the use of ISO 10646-1 / Unicode fonts can be found on

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs-fonts.html

This package also contains Markus Kuhn's ucs2any.pl Perl program and
map files that are originally distributed in

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz

This way, all of Jim's original 8-bit fonts can easily automatically
regenerated from a single source version, which will simplify
maintenance and future extension significantly. Just call

  ./map_fonts

and all the 8-bit versions will be created in the subdirectory
derived-fonts/.

This package was prepared in the hope that Jim Knoble will incorporate
it into the next distribution of his fonts. Markus Kuhn's
contributions are in the public domain, for Jim Knoble's license, see
the documentation of his above package.

Hopefully, these nice fonts get extended one day to cover at least the
Latin-A section and the CP1252 repertoire completely, perhaps even
WGL4 and MES-2.

Known problems with these fonts:

  - U+0027 and U+0060 still have the old 1968 ANXI X3.4 shapes that
    encourage abuse of these characters as directional quotes and not
    the modern ANSI/ISO/ECMA/Unicode shapes. For details, see
    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

  - Perhaps the line "DEFAULT_CHAR 0" should be added to the BDF
    properties, and the default character 0 should better look like
    a dashed or dotted box as with the new -misc-fixed-*-iso10646-1 fonts.

  - The licence should be relaxed from GPL to MIT. It de-facto doesn't
    make a difference (for pixel fonts, there is no such thing as
    source code or compiling), but the XFree86 and X.Org folks are
    too nervous about allowing any GPL stuff to be added to XFree86.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
