Fonts

Overview

This page adresses all issues concerning fonts in ReactOS.

What fonts does ReactOS need?

ReactOS needs a set of fonts wich can replace the standard MS Windows fonts. These fonts should have support for a wide range of characters, like Latin, Greek Cyrillic and some more. Later ReactOS might also need Asian and Arabic fonts. But not all characters have to be in all fonts.

Suggestion: divide the fonts into the unicode categories (look here. Put all characters from one category into the main fonts of that category. It doesn't make much sense to have chinese letters in Sans Serif and Serif. Also put math operators and some basic symbols into the fonts. Additional fonts may only have a basic character set. Put Braille, ancient fonts, extended symbols, wingdings and webdings in different fonts.

Important Fonts

1. Arial
2. Courier (New)
3. Fixedsys / System / Terminal
4. Lucida Console
5. MS Sans Serif
6. Times New Roman

Additional Fonts

1. Comic Sans MS
2. Script

Font Naming

1. The font file should be named like the font. Font names like c0633bt_.ttf or UTB_____.ttf don't look very good and are confusing.
2. ReactOS might create some basic fonts from opensource fonts and give these fonts easy to remember names.

Free and GPL compatible fonts

This is a list of fonts out there that have a GNU GPL compatible license.

Doulos SIL

1. Homepage: http://scripts.sil.org
2. Similar to: Times New Roman
3. Character sets: Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin-Extended-A/B, Latin Extended Additional, IPA Extensions, Spacing Modifier Letters, Combining Diacritical Marks, Cyrillic, Phonetic Extensions, Phonetic Extensions Supplement, Subscripts and Superscripts, Currency Symbols, Number Forms, some Arrows, some Math Operators
4. License: SIL OFL
5. Comment: no italic or bold

Gentium

1. Homepage: http://scripts.sil.org
2. Similar to: Georgia
3. Character sets:
4. License: SIL OFL

Charis SIL

1. Homepage: http://scripts.sil.org
2. Similar to: Bitstream Charter
3. Character sets:
4. License: SIL OFL

Free Monospaced

1. Homepage: [1]
2. Similar to: Courier New
3. Character sets: Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin-Extended-A/B, Latin Extended Additional, IPA Extensions, Greek, Greek Extended, Cyrillic, Armenian, Hebrew, Runic, Alphabetical Presentation Forms, Subscripts and Superscripts, Number Forms, Arrows, Math Operators, Box Drawing, Block Elements, Geometric Shapes, Misc Symbols, Braille Patterns
4. License: GNU GPL
5. Comment: some letters look a little blurry, vertical distance seems wrong

Free Sans

1. Homepage: http://www.nongnu.org/freefont
2. Similar to: MS Sans Serif
3. Character sets: Basic Latin, Latin-1 supplement, Latin Extended-A/B, Latin Extended Additional, IPA Extensions, Greek, Greek extended, Cyrillic, Armenian, Hebrew, Syriac, Devangari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Kannada, Hiragana, Katakana, Alphabetical Presentation Forms, Subscripts and Superscripts, Number Forms, Arrows, Math Operators, Box Drawing, Block Elements
4. License: GNU GPL
5. Comment: some letters look a little blurry, vertical distance seems wrong

Free Serif

1. Homepage: http://www.nongnu.org/freefont
2. Similar to: Times New Roman
3. Character sets:?
4. License: GNU GPL
5. Comment: some letters look a little blurry, vertical distance seems wrong

Free Font Tools

1. FontForge
2. Manutius Site is in German, but there's a download link for English version, too. Freeware for Windows for editing .pfb fonts.