FONTLOG Old Standard font family ======================== This file provides detailed information on the Old Standard family of fonts. This information should be distributed along with the Old Standard fonts and any derivative works. Basic Font Information ---------------------- The Old Standard font family is an attempt to revive a specific type of Modern (classicist) style of serif typefaces, very commonly used in various editions printed in the late 19th and early 20th century, but almost completely abandoned later. Although contemporary typographers often consider this lettertype obsolete and out-of-fashion, it still has at least two advantages: -- The classicist style still can be considered a good choice for typesetting scientific papers, especially on social and humanitarian sciences, as its specific features are closely associated in the people's eyes with old books they learned on; -- the most beautiful examples of Greek and Cyrillic lettertypes were all based on the Modern style, so that for those scripts "Modern" fonts are much more appropriate than any contemporary (e. g. Times-based) designs. That's why the Old Standard font family has two main purposes: it is intended to be used as a specialized font for philologists (mainly classicists, germanists and slavists) and also as a general-purpose font for typesetting various editions in languages which use Greek or Cyrillic script. For this reason Old Standard provides glyphs for a wide range of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters. The name "Old Standard" was selected as opposed to the "Obyknovennaya Novaya" ("New Standard") typeface, widely used in the Soviet typography, which represents another, slightly different type of the same Modern style. The digital version of this font is now available from Paratype (http://www.paratype.ru). Of course this name doesn't look very original, but it seems to be a good choice for a revival of the most common lettertype of the early 20th century. ChangeLog --------- 2020 December 18 (Robert Alessi) Version 2.6 * Added 2nd pointer to Alexey Kryukov's archived webpage. * Added FONTLOG.txt (this file). * New file: OldStandard.fontspec. * Updated naming schemes in BoldItalic. Thanks to Jontxo Reig for testing. 2020 February 24 (Robert Alessi) Version 2.5 * Updated documentation and makefile. * Better g caron. * Added missing small capitals Ā, Ī and Ū. * Added font table. * Reset all hinting information and instructions. * Removed duplicate c2sc and smcp rules. * Added small capitals for all Greek accented letters. 2019 July 26 (Robert Alessi) Version 2.4a * Reshaped macron, acute, grave and j in BoldItalic. 2019 July 25 (Robert Alessi) Version 2.4 * Added auto-generated BoldItalic. 2019 July 24 (Robert Alessi) Version 2.3 (1.0 in the current git repo) * Fixed missing direction in U+2023. * fixed missing control points, wrong coordinates and directions in OldStandardT-Italic.sfd. * Added g caron. * Added small capitals in Regular (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Basic Russian and Arabic DMG). * Make +ss06 work if beta is preceded by a vowel with an accute accent taken from the Greek Extended Unicode block. 2011 April 30 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 2.2 * Latin Extended Additional (again, except Vietnamese and medievalist additions) for Bold and Italic. * More punctuation characters, including New Testament critical signs. * New implementation for the 'frac' feature: it is now possible to build any arbitrary fractions rather than just those available in Unicode in the precomposed form. * SIL's Graphite rendering technologie is now supported. The features available are mostly the same as for OpenType, but there are some additions (in particular it is possible to render a Greek text with accents above capitals). The manual has also been changed to reflect the new functionality. * Cosmetic glyph changes (foots/arms in Cyrillic 'Ka', 'Zhe', 'Ya' in particular). * Added human-readable stylistic set names (US English only) and style (sub-family) names in a few additional languages. * The fonts are now available also in the WOFF format to simplify embedding into web pages. 2009 November 18 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 2.1 (not released) * The "Greek and Coptic" Unicode range is now fully covered, except Coptic letters. The epigraphic letters have been implemented in a simple sans-serif style: I don't like "creativity" if it can result in producing urecognizable glyphs. * Regular and bold: New alternate glyphs for Cyrillic IE (U+0415/U+0435) and Ukrainian IE (U+0404/U+0454), used by default for Church Slavonic. The intent is to make Old Cyrillic YEST clearly distinguishable both from Latin E and "wide" YEST. * New glyphs for CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER MONOGRAPH UK (in all 3 styles). * I have implemented a k-shaped kappa in all three styles, a script rho in regular and bold and a rho with straignt tail in italic. These characters (except the script rho) are kept unencoded and can be accessed via the 'mgrk' feature tag. I don't think they would be very useful, but at least it is now possible to use Old Standard for typesetting a copy of the Unicode Greek codechart (I needed one for a book I was preparing). * Multiple cosmetic glyph changes. In particular Latin capital "C", "E", "F", "G", "L" and related glyphs have got heavier vertical serifs in the regular font. Cedilla is redesigned (once again) in regular and bold. Shapes of some Greek letters (including alternate beta and theta) have also been improved. * I no longer use custom PUA mappings. I have preserved PUA codepoints for a few standard glyphs (including capital accents) previously mapped there by Adobe, as well as for additional accented Greek characters implemented for compatibility with Ralph Hancock's fonts. Everything else has been moved outside the encoding. * Oops. I was wrong regarding "zhe with breve": this letter actually should be formed with a standard (Latin) breve rather than a Cyrillic telephone receiver-like accent. BTW I think rhis letter should be available in the font: since I already support historical Romanian characters, the modern Moldavian Cyrillic alphabet should be supported as well. * The regular font now includes most accented characters from the Latin Extended Additional range (but not Vietnamese). 2008 November 18 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 2.0 * A bold version is now available! * Added a full set of historical Cyrillic characters, as defined in Unicode 5.1; * Implemented Roman numerals and ancient Roman epigraphic letters (including Claudian letters). * Switched to lookup-based representation of the OpenType data in the source files to conform the new FontForge's file format; * Now both cubic and quadratic versions of the font outlines are stored in the same source files (one file for each style), as FontForge's new approach to multilayered fonts allows this; * Switched to OFL version 1.1; * FontForge now can generate reasonably good TTF instructions (it could not when OldStandard v. 1.0 was released). So the TTF fonts are now automatically instructed with FontForge. I still include the old instructions for the regular version (prepared with Peter Baker's xgridfit utility) into the source package, but they are no longer used in the font itself. This certainly makes some glyphs look worse, but improves the overall performance of the font (especially in the antialiased mode); * Danish Aringacute redesigned (now has the acute at the top of the ring and a specially designed, reduced in size, diacritic for the capital glyph); * Redesigned cedilla and all combinations with this accent in the upright font; * More contour cleanup; * Added accented combinations with "W" for Welsh; * Added several new math characters to the regular font. The intent was to fully cover the TeX OMS encoding, but this task is still far from being reached; * There is now a dedicated Unicode codepoint for capital insular "G" (U+A77D), so move the corresponding glyph to that location; * Corrected the shape of Greek symbol phi (U+03D5). It is still not recommended to use this glyph instead of the normal (looped) form; * Several new characters have been added, including the Latin letter EZH (U+01B7/U+0292) and capital Es Zett for German (U+1E9E). There are some new combining marks as well; * I used to consider the breve accent should always take the typically Cyrillic form when used after Cyrillic letters. However this assumption seems to be wrong: the specific form of the diacritic is actually an attribute of just three letters, i. e. "short i" (Russian etc.), "Short u" (Byelorussian) and "zhe with breve" (Moldavian). 2007 July 14 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 1.1 (not released) * Added Latin letters OPEN E and OPEN O, requested by an African user; * New glyph for ampersand in the upright font; * Redesigned Polish ogonek and Czech comma-like caron; * More work on italic Greek letters; * General contour cleanup for some glyphs. 2007 January 22 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 1.0 * Added the WHITE SQUARE (U+25A1) character; * Minor corrections in the fonts themselves and in the PDF manual. 2006 December 12 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 0.9 * Added a few more Latin Extended-B characters, yogh and wynn in particular (thanks to Peter Baker for the valuable information on the design of the letter yogh he provided). I also have implemented uppercase and lowercase versions of the insular "g". Thus Old Standard is now suitable for typesetting texts in Old and Middle English. * Added Hebrew aleph and a few Fraktur characters, useful for critical apparatus, especially in Bible/New Testament editions. * Implemented a full set of standard f-ligatures, present in most OpenType fonts. * Andrew Panov has convinced me to implement a set of mathematical glyphs, designed in the style of traditional Russian math typesetting. These glyphs are currently available only in the regular version of the font. * A PDF manual, explaining various features of the font, is now available. * Greek sampi (both uppercase and lowercase) has been redesigned. * Implemented Greek lunate epsilon and reversed lunate epsilon (the design doesn't match the remaining Greek letters though). Thus all Unicode slots intended for "alternate" and mathematical Greek glyphs are now covered. * A few improvements in the TTF instructions for the regular font (drop-out control has been enabled). * Several minor corrections in the OpenType layouts. 2006 October 01 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 0.8 * Implemented a set of TrueType instructions (hints) for the regular font (italics are still unhinted). I would like to thank Peter Baker for his excellent (and extremely well documented) xgridfit program (http://xgridfit.sourceforge.net), which provides a good Open Source solution for gridfitting, or "hinting," TrueType fonts. * The TrueType version of the regular font now has a separate source file (OldStandard.ttf.sfd) with quadratic splines. * Changed the naming convention for the TrueType version: the font name now has a "TT" suffix, so that both TTF and OTF versions can be installed on the same system simultaneously. * Added a few Latin Extended-B characters, useful mainly for germanists, in particular "b" with bar, "o" with ogonek and hwair. Also I have corrected shapes of lowercase eth and thorn. Thus Old Standard now includes all characters necessary for representing Old Icelandic texts and Gothic transliteration. Still more characters (the most important of them being uppercase and lowercase yogh) are needed for a proper support of Old/Middle English. * As usual, a few minor bugs have been corrected. 2006 June 09 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 0.7 * Added OpenType layouts for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. Special attention has been paid to correct shaping and positioning of diacritical marks. * Minor corrections of glyph shapes. 2006 May 08 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 0.6 * License changed to the SIL Open Font License. * Added Greek glyphs, including those in the U+1F00--U+1FFF "Greek Extended" Unicode range. * Ukrainian and Serbian Cyrillic glyphs were redesigned in order to bring them into a better correspondance with real examples of the early 20th century printing. * The standard mathematical operation signs were redesigned and significantly enlarged, so that now their implementation contradicts to the contemporary standards, but better corresponds to the European tradition of math typesetting. * Several additional math characters, needed to provide a full coverage for the Mac Roman encoding, have been added. * Ancient Greek metrical characters (U+23D1--U+23D9) have been implemented. * A TTF version is released in addition to OpenType-CFF fonts. It has no hinting at all, so don't complain for bad screen rendering! 2006 Feb 14 (Alexey Kryukov) Version 0.2 * First public release. Acknowledgements ---------------- (Here is where contributors can be acknowledged. If you make modifications be sure to add your name (N), email (E), web-address (W) and description (D). This list is sorted by last name in alphabetical order.) N: Alexey Kryukov E: alexios@thessalonica.org.ru W: http://www.thessalonica.org.ru D: Original Designer of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic glyphs For more information please visit the Fonts page on Thessalonica's website: http://www.thessalonica.org.ru/en/fonts.html. Or send an email to . N: Robert Alessi E: alessi@robertalessi.net W: http://www.robertalessi.net D: Current maintainer of Old Standard