Gnu FreeFont
Global fontware

Below are listed some font resources. As some listed fonts come with a license incompatible with GPL, they have not all been used for constructing the Gnu FreeFonts, but all of them may be worth checking.

URW++ 35 Core PostScript Fonts 

The German digital typefoundry URW++ Design and Development released a commercial-quality set of 5 base PostScript fonts, expanded to include the complete 315-character Adobe PostScript 3 character set. The fonts are available under both the Aladdin Free Public License and the GNU General Public License. Their license notice explicitly allows embedding in PostScript and PDF documents. The fonts with the GNU General Public License are available with GNU Ghostscript version 6.0 or later.

CTAN The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network the authoritative collection of materials related to the TeX typesetting system.

The Omega Typesetting and Document Processing System

Omega is an extension of TeX developed by John Plaice and Yannis Haralambous. Its first release, aims primarily at improving TeX's multilingual abilities. In Omega all characters and pointers into data-structures are 16-bit wide, instead of 8-bit, thereby eliminating many of the trivial limitations of TeX. Omega also allows multiple input and output character sets, and uses programmable filters to translate from one encoding to another, to perform contextual analysis, etc. Internally, Omega uses the universal 16-bit Unicode standard character set, based on ISO-10646. Omega fonts are available under GNU GPL.

Greek Type 1 fonts

Angelo Haritsis (aka EelVex) created Greek versions of Times, Helvetica and Courier typefaces.

Cyrillic Type 1 fonts

Using PfaEdit, Valek Filipov extended the URW++ fonts with Cyrillic glyphs. (Note: is no longer hosted at ftp://ftp.gnome.ru/fonts/urw/, and I haven't located any other host.)

Armenian Helvetica Type 1 font

Sam Stepanyan created Arial Armenian font visually compatible with Helvetica, and made it free for non-commercial use.

Tempora LCG Unicode

Based on Valek Filipov's Cyrillic and Omega Serif, Alexey Kryukov made the very fine Tempora LCG font, which features Cyrillic, Greek, and many Latin extensions.

Culmus Project

Maxim Iorsh created a set of Hebew fonts visually compatible with New Century Schoolbook, Helvetica and Courier.

Project Meltho

The Syriac Computing Center (SyrCOM) of Beth Mardutho developed Project Meltho: Syriac Fonts for Windows XP[tm] and Office XP[tm].

Scholars Press

Jimmy Adair created a set of fonts for various Near-Eastern scripts while working for now-defunct Scholars Press. . There are currently eight public domain fonts available for use for non-commercial purposes (e.g., publicly accessible Web sites) by anyone who would like to download them; they may also be used in printed material. Anyone who wants to use the SP fonts in a commercial electronic product (online, CD-ROM, etc.) must get permission from Jimmy Adair, the copyright holder, prior to use.

Project Ayuta: Syriac Language Support

There is a project to add Syriac language support on Sourceforge, but last I checked it, nothing was going on.

Project Thaana : Universal Thaana Engine 

Universal Thaana Engine is an effort to create a free (BSD Licensed) English to Thaana encoding engine. This engine could be used in various software projects. An alpha version of this engine has been ported to PHP.

AnmolUni, AnmolUniBani

by Dr. Kulbir Singh Thind

Akruti Indian Language Fonts

M/S Cyberscape Multimedia Limited, Mumbai, developers of Akruti Software, released a set of TTF fonts for nine Indian scripts (Devanagari, Gujarati, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Oriya, and Gurumukhi) under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
note: The Akruti read at one point: Cyberscape ,which released the Akruti fonts under GPL has withdrawn the following fonts due to possible copyright issues.
[font names with Dev1, Guj2, Bng1, Knd2, Tml2, Png1, Ori2, Mal1]
FSF-India discourages the use of the above mentioned fonts for your work, particularly GPL based work.

Indix - Indian language support on Linux operating system

Along with support for Hindi, an OpenType Devanagari font, Raghu, was developed by by Prof. R.K.Joshi with assistance from Mr. Vinay Sayanekar. Raghu font has a copyrighted outlines, glyph set, and its name. It has been put in public domain for usage 'as is'. However the changes and/or modification in its existing outlines (for any other format) is not permitted and resold by any other designer than Prof. R.K.Joshi.

Indlinux

In preparation of an OpenType font, Guntupalli Karunakar estimates that in addition to the basic Unicode range 0900-097F, 204 more glyphs are needed for writing Hindi and Marathi using Devanagari script.

Bharatbhasha Shusha fonts

Harsh Kumar devised a phonetic Shusha system for typing Indic languages, where syllablic characters are broken up unto their consonant and vocal part. A free corresponding set of fonts covering Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Gurmukhi and Bangla is included. (Link at www.bharatbhasha.org.in no longer works. References found at IndLinuxSaga)

The Free Bangla Fonts Project

Sayamindu Dasgupta started a project to develop free OpenType Bangla fonts available under GNU GPL.

Bengali font

Using PfaEdit, Shaheed R. Haque created a set of Bengali glyphs matching the ISO 10646 isolated forms of Bengali.

singh Punjabi TeX font

Armajit Singh created the TeX font singh and placed it under the GPL.

Punjabi font

Hardip Singh Pannu created a set of Gurmukhi fonts. The fonts are copyrighted by him, and are free for not-for-profit use.

Oriya Unicode font

Sushant Kumar Dash created a set of Oriya glyphs (which, contrast to its name, are not really conforming to Unicode).

Tamil standard code for information interchange

A group of Tamil software developers, font creators, Tamil web-masters, Tamil scholars and teachers, vendors, and researchers drafted in 1997 a standard glyph set needed to render Tamil. The current version is 1.7.

Sarovar Project

The objective of this project is to develop a pan-Indic unicode font (devanagari, gujarati, bengali, telugu, tamil, kannada, malayalam, gurumukhi, urdu). Currently five scripts are supported.

Tikkana font

Prasad A. Chodavarapu developed Tikkana, a Telugu font exceeding the Unicode Telugu range with some composite glyphs.

Kannada Ganaka Parishat

Kannada Ganaka Parishat is a non-profit service organization that has been working hard towards implementation of many projects leading to unrestricted use of Kannada and easy implementation of Kannada as the medium in all types of computerisation activities.

Nudi Kannada Script Software

Nudi Kannada is a Kannada script managing software adhering to the standards prescribed by the Government of Karnataka.
note: There has been some question as to the status of these fonts, and lately, they have become hard to find.

TX Fonts

Professor Young U. Ryu from Department of Mathematics, University of Texas at Dallas, created a set of mathematical symbols visually compatible with Times.

The Dingbat Pages

A great collection of various dingbat fonts; freeware and shareware.

Chess Fonts

A Danish chess site with chess publishing resources.

Marvosym - Martin Vogel's Symbol Font

An interesting TrueType Symbol font. Freeware. There is a TeX version and a TrueType version.

Wadalab fonts

Between April 1990 and March 1992, Wadalab Kanji Comittee put together a series of scalable font files with Japanese scripts, in four forms: Sai Micho, Chu Mincho, Cho Kaku and Saimaru. The font files are written in custom file format, while tools for conversion into Metafont and PostScript Type 1 are also supplied. The Wadalab Kanji Comittee has later been dismissed, and the resulting files can be now found on the the Depertment of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics, Faculty of Engineering, University of Tokyo,. The package requires utilisp to run though. Still builds on 32-bit but not on 64-bit.

Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts

Fonts by George Douros, “offered free for any use”.

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing

Provides “Malayalam support for GNU systems,develop fonts, translation of desktop envionments like GNOME and KDE.”

sinhala-tex package

Contains Yannis Haralambous’ TeX font sinh.

velthuis fonts package

Contains Franz Velthuis’ TeX font devn.

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