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1FONTLOG
2Old Standard font family
3========================
4
5This file provides detailed information on the Old Standard family of
6fonts. This information should be distributed along with the Old Standard
7fonts and any derivative works.
8
9Basic Font Information
10----------------------
11
12The Old Standard font family is an attempt to revive a specific type of
13Modern (classicist) style of serif typefaces, very commonly used in various
14editions printed in the late 19th and early 20th century, but almost
15completely abandoned later. Although contemporary typographers often
16consider this lettertype obsolete and out-of-fashion, it still has at least
17two advantages:
18
19-- The classicist style still can be considered a good choice for
20typesetting scientific papers, especially on social and humanitarian
21sciences, as its specific features are closely associated in the people's
22eyes with old books they learned on;
23
24-- the most beautiful examples of Greek and Cyrillic lettertypes were all
25based on the Modern style, so that for those scripts "Modern" fonts
26are much more appropriate than any contemporary (e. g. Times-based)
27designs.
28
29That's why the Old Standard font family has two main purposes: it is
30intended to be used as a specialized font for philologists (mainly
31classicists, germanists and slavists) and also as a general-purpose font
32for typesetting various editions in languages which use Greek or Cyrillic
33script. For this reason Old Standard provides glyphs for a wide range of
34Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters.
35
36The name "Old Standard" was selected as opposed to the "Obyknovennaya
37Novaya" ("New Standard") typeface, widely used in the Soviet typography,
38which represents another, slightly different type of the same Modern style.
39The digital version of this font is now available from Paratype
40(http://www.paratype.ru). Of course this name doesn't look very original,
41but it seems to be a good choice for a revival of the most common
42lettertype of the early 20th century.
43
44ChangeLog
45---------
462011 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
712009 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
1132008 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
1722007 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
1842007 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
1902006 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
2252006 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
2502006 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
2582006 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
2832006 Feb 14 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 0.2
284
285 * First public release.
286
287Acknowledgements
288----------------
289(Here is where contributors can be acknowledged. If you make modifications
290be 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
293N: Alexey Kryukov
294E: alexios@thessalonica.org.ru
295W: http://www.thessalonica.org.ru
296D: Original Designer of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic glyphs
297
298For more information please visit the Fonts page on Thessalonica's
299website: http://www.thessalonica.org.ru/en/fonts.html.
300
301Or send an email to <alexios at thessalonica dot org dot ru>.