Re: Vista Fonts

From: Alexej Kryukov (akrioukov@newmail.ru)
Date: Sat Mar 17 2007 - 15:53:41 CST

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    On Saturday 17 March 2007 21:27, you wrote:

    > incorporating these characters. I firmly believe that the only way to
    > correctly display Old Cyrillic texts is in fonts whose entire
    > Cyrillic glyph set conforms to the conventions of one of the
    > pre-Petrine historical styles.

    John,

    although you are right that the Slavonic style should be preferred
    for Old Cyrillic texts, implementing the whole set of historical
    Cyrillic letters in the Roman style does make a sense even for
    typographic purposes. In fact, typesetting at least some types
    of historical documents (Old Russian, if not Church Slavonic)
    with modern fonts is a well established tradition, and many
    editions, published in Russia and Soviet Union, were set by
    this way. This practice is especially reasonable in those cases
    where publishers decide to simplify the orthography of the original
    text, preserving, however, some archaic letters.

    That's why I think reasonably good romanized forms are possible
    for most of historical Cyrillic characters. You may have a look at
    the recent Cyrillic proposal by Michael Everson which contains
    both the acceptable reference glyphs and several examples of
    historical characters used in various printing styles. The
    actual problem is just that the developers of Vista fonts have
    based their design on the current code chart, whose reference
    glyphs for historical Cyrillic are mostly bad (nobody complained
    on this until recently, us most font designers ignored those
    characters anyway, so that implementing them was left to a few
    enthusiasts).

    -- 
    Regards,
    Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov at newmail dot ru>
    Moscow State University
    Historical Faculty
    


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