Lady’s Gitweb - OldStandard/blob - FONTLOG.txt

   1 FONTLOG
   2 Old Standard font family
   3 ========================
   4
   5 This file provides detailed information on the Old Standard family of
   6 fonts. This information should be distributed along with the Old Standard
   7 fonts and any derivative works.
   8
   9 Basic Font Information
  10 ----------------------
  11
  12 The Old Standard font family is an attempt to revive a specific type of
  13 Modern (classicist) style of serif typefaces, very commonly used in various
  14 editions printed in the late 19th and early 20th century, but almost
  15 completely  abandoned later. Although contemporary typographers often
  16 consider this lettertype obsolete and out-of-fashion, it still has at least
  17 two advantages:
  18
  19 -- The classicist style still can be considered a good choice for
  20 typesetting scientific papers, especially on social and humanitarian
  21 sciences, as its specific features are closely associated in the people's
  22 eyes with old books they learned on;
  23
  24 -- the most beautiful examples of Greek and Cyrillic lettertypes were all
  25 based on the Modern style, so that for those scripts "Modern" fonts
  26 are much more appropriate than any contemporary (e. g. Times-based)
  27 designs.
  28
  29 That's why the Old Standard font family has two main purposes: it is
  30 intended to be used as a specialized font for philologists (mainly
  31 classicists, germanists and slavists) and also as a general-purpose font
  32 for typesetting various  editions in languages which use Greek or Cyrillic
  33 script. For this reason Old Standard provides glyphs for a wide range of
  34 Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters.
  35
  36 The name "Old Standard" was selected as opposed to the "Obyknovennaya
  37 Novaya" ("New Standard") typeface, widely used in the Soviet typography,
  38 which represents another, slightly different type of the same Modern style.
  39 The digital version of this font is now available from Paratype
  40 (http://www.paratype.ru). Of course this name doesn't look very original,
  41 but it seems to be a good choice for a revival of the most common
  42 lettertype of the early 20th century.
  43
  44 ChangeLog
  45 ---------
  46 2011 April 30 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 2.2
  47
  48     * Latin Extended Additional (again, except Vietnamese and medievalist additions)
  49       for Bold and Italic.
  50
  51     * More punctuation characters, including New Testament critical signs.
  52
  53     * New implementation for the 'frac' feature: it is now possible to build
  54       any arbitrary fractions rather than just those available in Unicode in the
  55       precomposed form.
  56
  57     * SIL's Graphite rendering technologie is now supported. The features available
  58       are mostly the same as for OpenType, but there are some additions (in
  59       particular it is possible to render a Greek text with accents above capitals).
  60       The manual has also been changed to reflect the new functionality.
  61
  62     * Cosmetic glyph changes (foots/arms in Cyrillic 'Ka', 'Zhe', 'Ya' in
  63       particular).
  64
  65     * Added human-readable stylistic set names (US English only) and style
  66       (sub-family) names in a few additional languages.
  67
  68     * The fonts are now available also in the WOFF format to simplify embedding
  69       into web pages.
  70
  71 2009 November 18 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 2.1 (not released)
  72
  73     * The "Greek and Coptic" Unicode range is now fully covered, except Coptic
  74       letters. The epigraphic letters have been implemented in a simple sans-serif
  75       style: I don't like "creativity" if it can result in producing urecognizable
  76       glyphs.
  77
  78     * Regular and bold: New alternate glyphs for Cyrillic IE (U+0415/U+0435) and
  79       Ukrainian IE (U+0404/U+0454), used by default for Church Slavonic. The intent
  80       is to make Old Cyrillic YEST clearly distinguishable both from Latin E and
  81       "wide" YEST.
  82
  83     * New glyphs for CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER MONOGRAPH UK (in all 3 styles).
  84
  85     * I have implemented a k-shaped kappa in all three styles, a script rho in
  86       regular and bold and a rho with straignt tail in italic. These characters
  87       (except the script rho) are kept unencoded and can be accessed via the 'mgrk'
  88       feature tag. I don't think they would be very useful, but at least it is now
  89       possible to use Old Standard for typesetting a copy of the Unicode Greek
  90       codechart (I needed one for a book I was preparing).
  91
  92     * Multiple cosmetic glyph changes. In particular Latin capital "C", "E", "F",
  93       "G", "L" and related glyphs have got heavier vertical serifs in the regular font.
  94       Cedilla is redesigned (once again) in regular and bold. Shapes of some Greek
  95       letters (including alternate beta and theta) have also been improved.
  96
  97     * I no longer use custom PUA mappings. I have preserved PUA codepoints for
  98       a few standard glyphs (including capital accents) previously mapped there
  99       by Adobe, as well as for additional accented Greek characters implemented
 100       for compatibility with Ralph Hancock's fonts. Everything else has been moved
 101       outside the encoding.
 102
 103     * Oops. I was wrong regarding "zhe with breve": this letter actually
 104       should be formed with a standard (Latin) breve rather than a Cyrillic
 105       telephone receiver-like accent. BTW I think rhis letter should be
 106       available in the font: since I already support historical Romanian
 107       characters, the modern Moldavian Cyrillic alphabet should be supported
 108       as well.
 109
 110     * The regular font now includes most accented characters from the
 111       Latin Extended Additional range (but not Vietnamese).
 112
 113 2008 November 18 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 2.0
 114
 115     * A bold version is now available!
 116
 117     * Added a full set of historical Cyrillic characters, as defined
 118       in Unicode 5.1;
 119
 120     * Implemented Roman numerals and ancient Roman epigraphic letters
 121       (including Claudian letters).
 122
 123     * Switched to lookup-based representation of the OpenType data
 124       in the source files to conform the new FontForge's file format;
 125
 126     * Now both cubic and quadratic versions of the font outlines are stored
 127       in the same source files (one file for each style), as FontForge's
 128       new approach to multilayered fonts allows this;
 129
 130     * Switched to OFL version 1.1;
 131
 132     * FontForge now can generate reasonably good TTF instructions (it
 133       could not when OldStandard v. 1.0 was released). So the TTF fonts
 134       are now automatically instructed with FontForge. I still include
 135       the old instructions for the regular version (prepared with
 136       Peter Baker's xgridfit utility) into the source package, but they
 137       are no longer used in the font itself. This certainly makes some
 138       glyphs look worse, but improves the overall performance of the font
 139       (especially in the antialiased mode);
 140
 141     * Danish Aringacute redesigned (now has the acute at the top of the ring
 142       and a specially designed, reduced in size, diacritic for the capital
 143       glyph);
 144
 145     * Redesigned cedilla and all combinations with this accent in the upright
 146       font;
 147
 148     * More contour cleanup;
 149
 150     * Added accented combinations with "W" for Welsh;
 151
 152     * Added several new math characters to the regular font. The intent was
 153       to fully cover the TeX OMS encoding, but this task is still far from
 154       being reached;
 155
 156     * There is now a dedicated Unicode codepoint for capital insular "G"
 157       (U+A77D), so move the corresponding glyph to that location;
 158
 159     * Corrected the shape of Greek symbol phi (U+03D5). It is still not
 160       recommended to use this glyph instead of the normal (looped) form;
 161
 162     * Several new characters have been added, including the Latin letter EZH
 163       (U+01B7/U+0292) and capital Es Zett for German (U+1E9E). There are
 164       some new combining marks as well;
 165
 166     * I used to consider the breve accent should always take the typically
 167       Cyrillic form when used after Cyrillic letters. However this assumption
 168       seems to be wrong: the specific form of the diacritic is actually
 169       an attribute of just three letters, i. e. "short i" (Russian etc.),
 170       "Short u" (Byelorussian) and "zhe with breve" (Moldavian).
 171
 172 2007 July 14 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 1.1 (not released)
 173
 174     * Added Latin letters OPEN E and OPEN O, requested by an African user;
 175
 176     * New glyph for ampersand in the upright font;
 177
 178     * Redesigned Polish ogonek and Czech comma-like caron;
 179
 180     * More work on italic Greek letters;
 181
 182     * General contour cleanup for some glyphs.
 183
 184 2007 January 22 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 1.0
 185
 186     * Added the WHITE SQUARE (U+25A1) character;
 187
 188     * Minor corrections in the fonts themselves and in the PDF manual.
 189
 190 2006 December 12 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 0.9
 191
 192     * Added a few more Latin Extended-B characters, yogh and wynn in
 193       particular (thanks to Peter Baker for the valuable information on the
 194       design of the letter yogh he provided). I also have implemented
 195       uppercase and lowercase versions of the insular "g". Thus Old
 196       Standard is now suitable for typesetting texts in Old and Middle
 197       English.
 198
 199     * Added Hebrew aleph and a few Fraktur characters, useful for critical
 200       apparatus, especially in Bible/New Testament editions.
 201
 202     * Implemented a full set of standard f-ligatures, present in most
 203       OpenType fonts.
 204
 205     * Andrew Panov has convinced me to implement a set of mathematical
 206       glyphs, designed in the style of traditional Russian math
 207       typesetting. These glyphs are currently available only in the regular
 208       version of the font.
 209
 210     * A PDF manual, explaining various features of the font, is now
 211       available.
 212
 213     * Greek sampi (both uppercase and lowercase) has been redesigned.
 214
 215     * Implemented Greek lunate epsilon and reversed lunate epsilon (the
 216       design doesn't match the remaining Greek letters though). Thus all
 217       Unicode slots intended for "alternate" and mathematical Greek glyphs
 218       are now covered.
 219
 220     * A few improvements in the TTF instructions for the regular font
 221       (drop-out control has been enabled).
 222
 223     * Several minor corrections in the OpenType layouts.
 224
 225 2006 October 01 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 0.8
 226
 227     * Implemented a set of TrueType instructions (hints) for the regular
 228       font (italics are still unhinted). I would like to thank Peter Baker
 229       for his excellent (and extremely well documented) xgridfit program
 230       (http://xgridfit.sourceforge.net), which provides a good Open Source
 231       solution for gridfitting, or "hinting," TrueType fonts.
 232
 233     * The TrueType version of the regular font now has a separate source
 234       file (OldStandard.ttf.sfd) with quadratic splines.
 235
 236     * Changed the naming convention for the TrueType version: the font name
 237       now has a "TT" suffix, so that both TTF and OTF versions can be
 238       installed on the same system simultaneously.
 239
 240     * Added a few Latin Extended-B characters, useful mainly for
 241       germanists, in particular "b" with bar, "o" with ogonek and hwair.
 242       Also I have corrected shapes of lowercase eth and thorn. Thus Old
 243       Standard now includes all characters necessary for representing Old
 244       Icelandic texts and Gothic transliteration. Still more characters
 245       (the most important of them being uppercase and lowercase yogh) are
 246       needed for a proper support of Old/Middle English.
 247
 248     * As usual, a few minor bugs have been corrected.
 249
 250 2006 June 09 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 0.7
 251
 252     * Added OpenType layouts for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. Special
 253       attention has been paid to correct shaping and positioning of
 254       diacritical marks.
 255
 256     * Minor corrections of glyph shapes.
 257
 258 2006 May 08 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 0.6
 259
 260     * License changed to the SIL Open Font License.
 261
 262     * Added Greek glyphs, including those in the U+1F00--U+1FFF "Greek
 263       Extended" Unicode range.
 264
 265     * Ukrainian and Serbian Cyrillic glyphs were redesigned in order to
 266       bring them into a better correspondance with real examples of
 267       the early 20th century printing.
 268
 269     * The standard mathematical operation signs were redesigned and
 270       significantly enlarged, so that now their implementation contradicts
 271       to the contemporary standards, but better corresponds to the European
 272       tradition of math typesetting.
 273
 274     * Several additional math characters, needed to provide a full coverage
 275       for the Mac Roman encoding, have been added.
 276
 277     * Ancient Greek metrical characters (U+23D1--U+23D9) have been
 278       implemented.
 279
 280     * A TTF version is released in addition to OpenType-CFF fonts. It has
 281       no hinting at all, so don't complain for bad screen rendering!
 282
 283 2006 Feb 14 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 0.2
 284
 285     * First public release.
 286
 287 Acknowledgements
 288 ----------------
 289 (Here is where contributors can be acknowledged. If you make modifications
 290 be sure to add your name (N), email (E), web-address (W) and description
 291 (D). This list is sorted by last name in alphabetical order.)
 292
 293 N: Alexey Kryukov
 294 E: alexios@thessalonica.org.ru
 295 W: http://www.thessalonica.org.ru
 296 D: Original Designer of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic glyphs
 297
 298 For more information please visit the Fonts page on Thessalonica's
 299 website: http://www.thessalonica.org.ru/en/fonts.html.
 300
 301 Or send an email to <alexios at thessalonica dot org dot ru>.