SIL International releases two fonts: Charis SIL and Doulos SIL

(February 2006) SIL International is pleased to announce the official release of the Charis SIL Unicode fonts. Charis SIL provides a single Unicode-based font family that contains near-complete coverage of all the characters defined in Unicode 4.1 for Latin and Cyrillic-based writing systems, whether used for phonetic or orthographic needs. In addition, there is provision for other characters and symbols useful to linguists. These fonts make use of state-of-the-art font technologies to support complex typographic issues, such as the need to position arbitrary combinations of base glyphs and diacritics optimally.

Charis SIL is a serif, proportionally-spaced font optimized for readability in long printed documents. (It is similar in design to Bitstream Charter, one of the first fonts designed specifically for laser printers.) The Charis SIL font is highly readable even in less-than-ideal reproduction environments. It also has a full set of styles - regular, italic, bold, and bold italic. It has been released under SIL's Open Font License.

The goals of the Open Font License (OFL) are to stimulate worldwide development of cooperative font projects, to support the font creation efforts of academic and linguistic communities, and to provide an open framework in which fonts may be shared and improved in partnership with others. The OFL allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely as long as they are not sold by themselves. The fonts, including any derivative works, can be bundled, embedded, redistributed and sold with any software provided that the font names of derivative works are changed. The fonts and derivatives, however, cannot be released under any other type of license.

At the same time, SIL has also released an update of the Doulos SIL font to match the character set represented in Charis SIL.

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