The Culmus Project

I have always been wondering who are the people who draw letters. Now I know they are mathematicians.
K. Shagin

The Culmus project aims at providing the Hebrew-speaking GNU/Linux and Unix community with a basic collection of Hebrew fonts for X Windows.

Presently the collection contains fifteen font families of different styles. I hope to add more fonts, as the time comes.

Latest release: 0.140 ( Download or view sample )

Release Notes:

Major refactoring of the existing fonts. Added romanization characters.

Changes:
  1. All fonts are now distributed in OpenType format, PS Type 1 is obsoleted.
  2. General-use glyph coverage substantially expanded and Hebrew romanization added to Simple CLM by Aharon Varady.
  3. Hebrew romanization characters are also supported in Frank Ruehl CLM, Nachlieli CLM, and Miriam Mono CLM.
  4. Drugulin CLM how comes in bold face only, bold italic was extracted and renamed to Farissol.
  5. Drugulin CLM now supports diacritics.
  6. All fonts with diacritics now support meteg, rafe, and ACCENT OLE.
  7. Added YOD TRIANGLE to most basic fonts.
  8. Fixed fontconfig warnings.

Specifications and standards:

Unicode Hebrew (0590-05FF)
Unicode Alphabetic Presentation Forms (FB00-FB4F)
Unicode Basic Latin (0020-007F)
Unicode Currency (20A0-20CF)
Microsoft Hebrew OpenType Recommendations

Mailing Lists:

There is a mailing list available at the project:

Acknowledgements:

I'd like to thank George Williams for his FontForge, the ultimate tool for font design.

Also, many thanks to Aharon Varady, the head of the Open Siddur project for his numerous contributions, suggestions for improvement and insightful comments about the fonts.

License

This section is provided for informational purposes only. The legal status of each font is governed solely by the copyright notice inside it.

The fonts are distributed under the terms of GNU General Public License version 2, some of them with embedding exception.

Some of the fonts contain parts created by various entities, see the LICENSE file inside the relevant tarball or among the accompanying documentation files.

Hebrew cantillation marks OpenType layout logic copyright (c) 2003 & 2007, Ralph Hancock and John Hudson. This layout logic for Biblical Hebrew is open source software under the MIT License; for details contact copyright holders at Tiro.

Contact

For all questions regarding the project please contact Maxim Iorsh (מקסים יורש).