Gentium

README - WINDOWS

Gentium Release 1.02

28 November 2005

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Thank you for your interest in the Gentium fonts.

We hope you find them useful!

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. It 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. It has won

a "Certificate of Excellence in Typeface Design" in two major international

typeface design competitions: bukva:raz! (2001) and TDC2003 (2003).

Gentium provides glyphs for a wide range of Latin and Greek characters.

It currently supports the following ranges of Unicode 3.0 (completely unless

noted):

Range Description

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

U+0020-U+007F Basic Latin

U+00A0-U+00FF Latin-1 Supplement

U+0100-U+017F Latin Extended-A

U+0180-U+021F Latin Extended-B

U+0222-U+0233 Latin Extended-B (continued)

U+0250-U+02AD IPA Extensions

U+02B0-U+02FF Spacing Modifier Letters

U+0300-U+036F Combining Diacritical Marks

U+0370-U+03D5 Greek (not including archaic or Coptic)

U+1E00-U+1EFF Latin Extended Additional

U+1F00-U+1FFF Greek Extended

U+2000-U+203A General Punctuation (partial)

U+2070-U+209F Superscripts and Subscripts

U+20A0-U+20CF Currency Symbols (partial)

U+2100-U+214F Letterlike Symbols (only a couple)

Gentium Regular also includes some Cyrillic glyphs, but they are only early

drafts. A future version will include a completely revised set, and will

expand the support for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic to cover Unicode 4.1. It

will also include support for OpenType, Graphite and AAT smart font

technologies.

Gentium is released under the SIL Open Font License.

Gentium is a trademark of SIL International.

See the OFL and OFL-FAQ for details of the SIL Open Font License.

See the FONTLOG for information on this and previous releases.

See the QUOTES file to read the feedback received from Gentium users.

See the GENTIUM-FAQ file for frequently asked questions and their answers

(such as why there are two families of fonts included).

TIPS

====

We cannot afford to offer free technical support. The font has, however,

been through some testing on various platforms to be sure it works in most

situations. In particular, it has been tested and shown to work on Windows

2000 and Windows XP.

If you do find a problem, please do report it to .

We can't guarantee any direct response, but will try to fix reported bugs in

future versions. Make sure you read through the Gentium FAQ.

Many problems can be solved, or at least explained, through an understanding

of the encoding and use of the fonts. Here are some basic hints:

Encoding:

The fonts are encoded according to Unicode, so your application must support

Unicode text in order to access letters other than the standard alphabet.

Most Windows applications provide basic Unicode support. You will, however,

need some way of entering Unicode text into your document.

Keyboarding:

Gentium does not include any keyboarding helps or utilities. It uses the

built-in keyboards of the operating system. You will need to install the

appropriate keyboard and input method for the characters of the language you

wish to use. If you want to enter characters that are not supported by any

system keyboard, the Keyman program (www.tavultesoft.com) can be helpful.

Another method of entering some symbols is provided by a few applications

such as Adobe InDesign. They can display a glyph palette that shows all the

glyphs (symbols) in a font and allow you to enter them by clicking on the

glyph you want.

Rendering:

Gentium also currently lacks any special font programming that can

substitute one glyph for another or position glyphs in a 'smart' way, such

as in OpenType, Apple Advanced Typography or SIL's Graphite. For example,

although Gentium includes an 'ffl' ligature, there are no special routines

in the font that will automatically substitute 'f'+'f'+'l' with 'ffl', but

an individual application might provide that feature.

INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION

==============================

In Windows XP, open the Fonts control panel (Start, Control Panel,

Appearance and Themes, then look in the upper left). The drag the font

files (GenR102, GenI102, GenAR102, GenAI102) into the window - or choose

File, Install New Font..., and navigate to the files.

CONTACT

========

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