README - GNU/Linux
Gentium Release 1.02
28 November 2005
========================

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.

Read and print out the Gentium-RU-Specimen.pdf, Gentium-RU-A3Proofs.pdf and
Gentium-Greek-Specimen.pdf files for a detailed description of the Gentium
Project and various examples of multilingual text rendering.

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 FLOSS (Free/Libre and
Open Source Software) platforms to be sure it works in most situations.

If you do find a problem, please do report it to <gentium AT sil DOT org>.
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.

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, and to access the full Unicode range, we suggest you use
gucharmap, kcharselect or similar software.

Another method of entering specific symbols is provided by a few
applications such as OpenOffice.org. They can display a palette that shows
all the glyphs (symbols) in a font allowing you to select the desired glyph
and insert it directly into your text. This is available in the
application's menu under Insert->Special Characters. (A pull-down menu will
also allow you to identify the sub-section within a particular font.)
Abiword and Kword's special character dialogs only allow access to a smaller
selection of glyphs.

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

The package should have done its job and put everything in the right places
(normal and alternate versions of the fonts, documentation, license,
fontlog, FAQs and type specimens) but, in case you want to install the font
directly from the source tarball, here are some instructions:

Under GNOME:
- launch Nautilus from a menu or desktop shortcut
- type "fonts:" in the address bar
(Ctrl-L will show the location bar if it is hidden)
you can also use the System->Fonts menu entry, then press "Details" 
and the "Go to Font Folder" to open the font folder
(or type "nautilus fonts:" directly from a shell)
- then simply drag and drop the fonts into your font folder

Under KDE:
- launch "font install" in your menu under Configuration-KDE->System->Font
Install (you can also type "kcmshell kcmfontinst" directly from a shell)
- use the dialog boxes to browse to your fonts and install them

You can do the same manually:
- copy the fonts in ~/.fonts
(you will have to create the folder if it doesn't exist: "mkdir ~/.fonts")
And when you're in ~/.fonts:
- type "fc-cache -f -v ." to generate the fonts.cache-1 cache file

Note that OpenOffice.org version 2 now knows about system-wide fonts (using
fontconfig) unlike earlier versions. There is no need to use specific
OpenOffice.org tools to install the fonts.

If you want, you can also use GNOME's System->Fonts menu entry or KDE's
Configuration-KDE->System->Font to choose Gentium as your desktop font and
adjust the hinting and the anti-aliasing.

You can also copy the local.conf fontconfig definition file to activate
system-wide aliasing for Gentium and make it your main serif font:
type: "sudo mv /etc/fonts/local.conf local.conf.old"
followed by "sudo cp local.conf /etc/fonts/"
(Making a backup of your original configuration file is always a good idea,
you can copy back the old file if needed).
You can also add the section between the alias tags to an already existing
local.conf using your favorite text editor.


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 <gentium AT sil DOT org>

