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.