SIL International is pleased to announce the official release of the
Charis SIL Unicode fonts (http://scripts.sil.org/CharisSILfont). 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, and is similar in design to
Bitstream Charter, one of the first fonts designed specifically for laser
printers. It is highly readable and holds up well 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 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL):

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
(See http://scripts.sil.org/DoulosSILfont) to match the character set
represented in Charis SIL.


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