Linguist's Software has been creating professional-quality fonts since 1984. Most of our products were created to fill a perceived market need. Many of our products, however, have been created to meet the specific requests of one or more customers. If you have a language need that is not filled by any of our products, please contact us to see if we can either modify an existing product or create a new product for you.

There are two circumstances under which custom work will be performed free of charge. All other custom work will be done for a fee.

Custom work - free of charge

Linguist's Software strives to produce quality products, and we covet the suggestions of our customers about ways to improve our products. Under the following two circumstances, we will make changes to our product for free and provide a free upgrade to the registered owner requesting the change:

1. Any error in a product (that we agree is an error) will be corrected free of charge. This includes incorrectly formed, or missing, characters or diacritics. Many languages have multiple forms of some of their characters, with certain forms preferred under different circumstances. If you document a different or improved form of character, and we agree it should be changed, we will gladly provide a free upgrade to you.
2. Many of our products have national standard keyboards. We are constantly looking for additional, official keyboards to include in our products. For instance, our Cyrillic products have a transliterated keyboard along with Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Ukrainian national standard keyboards. Any customer providing us with documented, official keyboard layouts for other Cyrillic languages we are looking for, such as Kazakh, Azerbaijani, Belarus, Mongolian, etc., would receive an upgraded product with the new keyboard layout.

Any person not owning our product, but who aids us in improving it, may, at our discretion, be given a complimentary copy of the product as our way of saying thank you for your help.

Please contact us if you have access to a nation's standard keyboard layout, to see if it is one we wish to include in our product. And thanks!

Top | Home

Custom work - fee basis

The above are guidelines only. Please contact us to see if we can help you with your specialized font needs.

If you wish to have us make custom fonts for you, please supply the following information:

1. You will need to mail us large, clear samples of all characters to be added. (Faxing does not provide adequate samples.)
2. You need to tell us which ASCII allocation you wish each character to have. Please request if you need us to send you an ASCII chart for Mac or an ANSI chart for Windows of the font to be modified.
3. We need to know which characters you wish to replace in the font in order to insert new characters. Most of our fonts are completely full and in those cases one old character must be removed for each new character we wish to insert.
4. Identify any moving of character positions in the font.
5. Identify which typefaces and which styles of the characters you need. If you need the plain style only, it will be one price. If you need bold, italic, and bold-italic styles of the characters, it will cost $25.00 per character for each additional style.
6. Prior to the custom work being done, you will need to sign an agreement that we retain copyright to the fonts which we produce, that you will not sell them or give them to others, and that you will abide by the stipulations of the Software License. Any publishers or printers you wish to use would not be able to keep copies of the fonts for themselves unless they purchase their own copies (typically $99.95). Our Software License requires that you acknowledge the use of our font(s) in any of your publications. The details can be found in point number three of the License.
7. These prices include a maximum of two revisions of our artwork to be requested within 20 days of receipt of the work. Additional revisions will entail further cost.
8. If this custom work is to be for the UNIX platform, there is additional information we require.

Top | Home

Information Required for UNIX Platform Custom Work

Our Windows fonts can be converted for use with many implementations of UNIX. Keyboard Switcher, the Windows keyboard utility that makes input of the extended character set very easy in Windows, does not work in UNIX, though, so UNIX users must provide their own method for input of extended characters (such as ASCII or ANSI input, macros, keyboard mapping utilities, etc.). The standard character set can be mapped to any key on your keyboard as part of our development.

All conversions of our Windows products are custom services. Depending on circumstances, there may be development costs above the cost of the product. The information required by us to determine if we can build the font for you, and to determine the cost, follows. To shorten the time it takes us to prepare a cost for the project, please copy the following questions and email your answers to them to us. Contact . Or, you may download a copy of this form in Adobe® Acrobat® PDF version, which you may complete and fax or mail to us. If you have any questions, be sure to contact us.

1. Which language(s) and which font(s) do you need? Some of our packages have more than one font in them; do you want an entire package converted, or just one font from it converted for your use? Do you want only the plain style, or also the bold, italic and/or bolditalic styles, if available?
2. What operating system are you working on?
3. What font resolution does your system use, 75dpi or 100dpi? The latter increases the cost of development.
4. Does your operating system incorporate Display PostScript®, or do you require .BDF (bitmap distribution format) files for screen display? If your system requires .BDF files, your operating system will (should) come with a compiler or other utility to convert the .BDF file into a screen display font.
5. If you require .BDF files, in which point size(s) do you require them?
6. If you require .BDF files, do you require the screen bitmaps to be "polished", that is, refined, to improve the screen display? (This greatly increases the cost of the product, but gives a more uniform and attractive screen display.) Printer output is from the PostScript file, so it is always high quality; screen display quality will vary with character shape and size. The smaller point size bitmaps are less uniform in appearance. We are unable to demonstrate this for you; it depends entirely on your (video) system.
7. If you require .BDF files, we need you to fax or mail a printout of the first page of another .BDF file from your system, so that we may see the variables your system requires in such files. .BDF files may be opened in any text editor.
8. Do you require a custom layout of the font(s), or is the ASCII layout of our font acceptable? We will send ASCII charts to you of the fonts you wish to be converted to UNIX, to help you determine what layout you require. (Any modification of the layout increases cost.) Note that some languages do have international standards. Other languages have no established standard. If you require a certain ASCII mapping of the characters, you will have to provide that mapping, or layout, for us.
9. What font encoding does your operating system require? Many UNIX systems require ISO encoding (specifically ISO-8859-1 Latin 1 encoding). Most of our fonts are not ISO encoded, so conversion costs a little extra.
10. How will the font be used: on standalone computers (how many), on a network (how many workstations), incorporation into an application you are developing for sale, or resale to a customer of yours, etc.? Including our font(s) into an application you are developing will also require a license.
11. What are your time requirements?

Download an Adobe® Acrobat® PDF version of this form.