Syllabics Resources





Fonts } Free fonts







Euphemia

Canadian Syllabics & Latin Scripts





Euphemia covers most languages which use the Canadian Syllabic script including various Cree orthographies, Inuktitut and the historical Carrier/Dakelh script (dulkw'ahke). Three fonts are available with free end-user licences in TrueType-OpenType format (.ttf).





NOTE: licenses for these fonts are distributed free to end-users only. If you wish to re-distribute the fonts in any manner, please contact Tiro for information on distribution licenses. Corporations, Companies or other commercial interests will be required to purchase Distribution Licenses if the fonts are to be utilised in a for-profit environment. Exemptions may be granted in some cases by contacting us. Redistribution of these files is prohibited without a Distribution License.

Read the Euphemia UCAS EULA



Windows/OSX TrueType font files

[264KB][v.2.66]





· Current version 2.66

· Font family includes Regular, Bold and Italic styles.

· Character compliment includes Unified Canadian Syllabics Unicode range, Windows 1252 Latin script codepage. Small Caps and OSF to be re-introduced in ver. 2.67. Version 2.66 matches Vista distribution.



Character compliment

[193KB][v.6.xi.2004]

(small caps & OSFigures not shown in this document)



· Hinted for ClearType and greyscale rendering

If you would like to donate towards the future development of these, and other Tiro fonts with free end-user licenses, do so by clicking the link below:

Usage notes

Some users may notice that when typesetting with Euphemia (or Pigiarniq/Uqammaq) Latin text the wordspace is quite large. The reason for this is that a larger wordspace is required for typesetting in syllabics, and so the default space has an advance width that is more confortable in syllabic texts then in Latin texts. The fonts include kerning tables which kern the Latin glyphs against the space. The recommendation is to turn kerning on (in applications that support OpenType kerning) for Latin-based text and to turn kerning off or use Auto/Optical kerning for syllabics.





The first example shows syllabic text with the default space, optically kerned in InDesign. The second shows the same default space with latin text. This is how it would appear if kerning is off. The third shows the result of turning kerning on (in InDesign set the spacing method to ‘Metrics’).



If working in InDesign it is easy to do this by defining character or paragraph styles. For smaller runs of text it may be simpler to manually kern Latin glyphs against the space. In InDesign this can be achieved by selecting text and keying ‘ALT+CTRL+BACKSPACE’ (Win) or ‘OPTION+COMMAND+DELETE’ (Mac); this decreases the wordspace for the selected text.



Other Notes

If you already have copies of Euphemia which you downloaded previously, or which came bundled with Windows or Mac OS X, you will always find the most up-to-date version on this website should you want to upgrade. Fonts downloaded from the Tiro website may not have the same name as other distributions. Versions shipped by Microsoft or Apple or others are not guaranteed to be fully compatible with Tiro versions (generally Tiro versions will have a larger character and glyph set as well as other updated features).