README
Gentium Release 1.03
24 June 2011
====================

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 and Graphite 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 technical support at no cost. 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, Windows XP and Ubuntu.

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.
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, depending on your platform Keyman (www.tavultesoft.com), KMFL
(kmfl.sf.net), XKB (http://www.x.org/wiki/XKB) or Ukelele
(scripts.sil.org/ukelele) can be helpful.

Another method of entering some symbols is provided by a few applications
as Adobe InDesign, LibreOffice or gucharmap. 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
==============================

For installation tips - including using packages (installers) - please refer
to the documentation on http://scripts.sil.org/DecompressUtil

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>

