0.23 (20090217): All hinting information removed (Fontforge's auto hinting is
     very very ugly)

0.22: Hotfix: Chortle roman was missing many glyphs because a fontforge
      bug ate them.

      Some tweaking of metrics with the italic and bold italic typefaces.

      Version number updated.

0.21: "1" made less angular and top heavy in outline fonts.

      17 pixel version of bold and bold italic fonts done.
   
      Minor readability tweaks to 15-pixel roman font.

      Metrics of bold italic font widened so that lower case letters 
      do not overstrike each other.

      15-pixel bold font letters made narrower so as to better match the
      metrics of the printed form of the font.

      30-pixel version of fonts added; this is for X servers not
      running daemons that scale fonts.

      (20070322)

0.2:  Dot removed from 0.  It didn't look that great in printed documents.
  
      Bitmap renderings overhauled.  Most serifs removed from bitmap
      renderings; lower case letters "b", "d", "g", "p", "q", "o", "y"
      made more round to be easier to read.

      Unicode versions of fonts removed.  All fonts are now encoded
      with the "MaraIPA" encoding.  Now I no longer have to maintain
      two versions of the same fonts.

      Bdf non-bold weight name changed from "book" to "medium"

      17 pixel version of bold and italic font addded

      Outline version of Bold Italic font now uses glyphs taken from 
      Charis SIL.

      (Released 20070312)

0.12: License (OFL) clarified.  CHANGELOG renamed FONTLOG; font history
      added.  

      BoldItalic weight/slant added.  This is not a real italic
      typeface; this is the Bold type face automatically slanted
      using the FontForge tool, with the bitmap renderings corrected
      by hand.

      15-pixel bitmap renderings completed.

      Dot added to "0" and angle of top stoke in "1" moved down to 30
      degress (it was 17 degress before) to make the "0" unambiguous 
      compared to "O" and "1" unambiguous compared to "l".

      Bugfix: the "5" was a little wider than the other numbers.

0.11: Release 20070227.  Vertical spacing updated; big bullet removed from
      Unicode fonts and horizontal width of big bullet increased in 
      non-Unicode fonts.  Verson numbers corrected and updated.

0.1: Release 20070226; first public release of Chortle

---

Chortle is derived from Charis SIL, which is turn is derived from
Bitstream Charter.  Some history is in order here:

Back in 1992, the X consortium was trying to find fonts for their X11 
window system.  The only fonts available were bitmap fonts.  Basically,
a number of Adobe fonts were rendered for the screen at various resolutions
and points sizes so people could use these fonts.  However, there were no
vector (outline) font available for X; in order to print documents created
in X, the printer needed the appropriate vector fonts.

Bitstream rectified this situation by making two vector fonts freely
available for X:  A rendition of the Courier monospace typewriter font,
and Bitstream Charter, a porportional serif font optimized for laser
printing with the then very common 300dpi laser printers of that era.
Bitstream Charter was desiged by the font designer Matthew Carter,
who would later on design the Micorsoft web core fonts, including the
beautiful Verdana font.  The licensing for these two fonts was very
generous, and is as follows:

    (c) Copyright 1989-1992, Bitstream Inc., Cambridge, MA.

    You are hereby granted permission under all Bitstream propriety rights
    to use, copy, modify, sublicense, sell, and redistribute the 4 Bitstream
    Charter (r) Type 1 outline fonts and the 4 Courier Type 1 outline fonts
    for any purpose and without restriction; provided, that this notice is
    left intact on all copies of such fonts and that Bitstream's trademark
    is acknowledged as shown below on all unmodified copies of the 4 Charter
    Type 1 fonts.

    BITSTREAM CHARTER is a registered trademark of Bitstream Inc.

As an aside, the internal copyright notice in the Bitstream Charter font 
still claims that the font is confidential; this is not true.  The above
copyright notice has made this font freely available to anyone and
everyone.  To the extent of my knowledge, Bitstream Charter and
Bitstream Courier were the first ever open source vector fonts.

About half a decade later, the Summer Institute of Linguistics was looking
for a font for adding special characters that linguists use.  The only 
real option at the time was Bitstream Charter, so the SIL converted this 
font in to a true type font, and added some characters representing 
special IPA symbols.  Later on, once Unicode became mainstream, the SIL 
made Charis a Unicode font, and finally, in 2006, made the font open 
source via a license called the "Open Font License".

There are a number of differences between Bitstream Charter and Charis
SIL.  In addition to rendering far more glyphs than Birstream Charter,
Charis SIL also has a very high vertical spacing in order to accommodate
special complex accents that are sometimes used by Linguists.  Other
changes from Bitstream Charter are more subtle: The strokes in Charis
SIL are slightly thicker; the grave and accute accents have a different,
more rounded shape in Charis SIL; the space is a little more wide in
Charis SIL; etc.  

I have been very happy with Charis SIL, and used it for all of my
prepared classwork and homework in the fall of 2006.  In early 2007,
when I had more free time to evaluate the font, I decided that the 
font had two slight annoyances:

* The vertical spacing of the font is very high.  This makes it very
  hard to, say, write a document in another font then add IPA symbols
  from the Charis SIL font without an entire line going down about
  half a space.

* The font is not the best screen font.  This is a problem that
  has always plagued Bitstream Charter.

The first issue was fairly easy to solve in Fontforge.  The second issue
is a little more tedius to solve: I am rendering the font at various
small bitmap sizes in Fontforge, then cleaning up, by the, the resulting
bitmap fonts.  In order to minimize the amount of work this takes, I 
have reduced the number of glyphs from over 3000 to a much more 
manageable 200.  This reduction in the number of glyphs also allows me 
to make a version of the Chortle font that works with older programs 
that can only handle 8-bit encodings, such as older word processors, 
and the rxvt terminal emulator.

In accordance with the OFL license, I am including a copy of the OFL
with this font, and have changed the name of this font to "Chortle".

