jacob@gore.com (Jacob Gore) (05/15/91)
Since there've been many questions on typesetting Russian on the NeXT, and
since doing it involves some postscript font tweaking, I placed into the
"submissions" directories on cs.orst.edu and sonata.cc.purdue.edu a file
called "CyrillicGothic.pkg.tar". If you untar it, you will get an
Installer package containing Jay Secora's CyrillicGothic font, made to work
on NeXTs. Its README file is attached.
Jacob
--
Jacob Gore Jacob@Gore.Com boulder!gore!jacob
README file for the CyrillicGothic font
Jay Sekora <js@princeton.edu>
Modified by Jacob Gore <jacob@gore.com> for the NeXT distribution.
("I" refers to Jay, not Jacob.)
ABOUT THE FONT
CyrillicGothic is a PostScript and bitmapped font primarily for the
Macintosh intended to provide all the Cyrillic characters necessary for
general-purpose, technical, and bibliographical word-processing in all
the Slavic languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet. Visually it is
reminiscent of Helvetica - a proportionally-spaced, sans-serif font. In
addition to Cyrillic letters, it provides diacritical marks necessary
for linguistic citation of Russian, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian words.
Its encoding maps ASCII digits, and the punctuation on the digit keys,
to Cyrillic letters (and diacriticals); on the Macintosh, to get the
corresponding "normal" characters, hold down the Option key (or the
Option and Shift keys).
The font was designed by Jay Sekora (yours truly) using Fontographer
version 3.1.
ABOUT THE NeXT DISTRIBUTION
This distribution is an expanded version of a previous distribution,
customized for NeXT. Changes to the PostScript include the addition of
French quotation marks and the Ukrainian hard G, and some minor adjustments
to a few glyphs. No bitmaps are provided in the NeXT distribution.
The NeXT distribution consists of an Installer package, which includes:
CyrillicGothic - a version of the PostScript font suitable for
Display PostScript
CyrillicGothic.afm - Adobe Font Metrics for the font
CyrillicGothic.README - this file
PROBLEMS
Users may have trouble using the upper-128 characters. In addition to some
letters, such as Serbian- and Church Slavonic-specific letters, this range
contains the numbers and some punctuation, so this may be a problem.
However, the lower 96 characters contain all the letters necessary for
Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian, among other languages. (Exception:
the Ukranian hard G is not in this range, but Ukranian in the Soviet Union
is often written without that letter.)
The keyboard layout is adequate for Russian, but less than ideal for
many of the other Slavic languages. Keyboard mappings should be
controllable on the fly, but as of NextStep 2.1, they aren't, so it's
up to each application (sorry, no information on which, if any, do).
Not enough bitmap font sizes are provided, and they aren't at NeXT
resolution.
Placement of diacriticals is fixed with respect to the cursor position,
so it cannot be appropriate for all letters.
Capital glyphs are not provided for all of the Old Church Slavonic
letters, largely because I wasn't confident what they should look like.
No specifically non-Slavic Cyrillic characters are included, partly
because of space limitations and partly because I didn't have a complete
compendium.
It would be nice if the glyphs meshed a little better with Helvetica.
FEEDBACK
I would like to hear from people using this font. In particular, I
would be grateful if you would send me back any Macintosh or NeXT
keyboard layout files that you create. I would also be happy to work
with people who need characters not included in the font. Also, if any
of the glyphs is wrong, please let me know. (I don't read all the
languages in question, and I'm not *entirely* confident of the OCS
glyphs - the source I was working from was clearly just borrowing Greek
letters, and didn't give capital forms.)
You can contact me via email as js@princeton.edu on the Internet or
JS@PUCC on BITNET. I prefer email, but I may also be reached by paper
mail at
Jay Sekora
CIT Information Centers
87 Prospect Avenue
Princeton, NJ 08544
or by telephone at 609/258-6007 (work) or 609/466-8833 (home--
preferred).
(Seems only fair that the same information be provided for the NeXT version:
Jacob Gore <jacob@gore.com>
3044 S. Akron St.
Denver, CO 80231-4605
303-696-7893, fax 303-369-0678)
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
I hope to create an ISO 8859 and/or al'ternativnyj variant and/or KOI-7
encoding of these fonts. None of these, of course, would provide as
many symbols as the original, but they would be more useful with
existing files than my brain-dead encoding :-)
I'd also be especially interested in seeing these fonts integrated into
Unicode applications and/or filters.
PLEASE NOTE
That this font is in no way whatsoever supported by Princeton
University, and Princeton assumes no responsibility for it. The only
connection this font has with Princeton is that I am a Princeton
employee and I used tools available to me at my place of work to create
it. In fact, I cannot promise any kind of support myself. I am
interested in hearing about things you'd like to see done with the font,
but I can not say I'll have the time to help you do them.