Old Standard

License

Copyright (c) 2006-2011 Alexey Kryukov (amkryukov@gmail.com), without Reserved Font Names.

Copyright (c) 2019-2020, Robert Alessi (alessi@robertalessi.net), without Reserved Font Names.

Please send error reports and suggestions for improvements to Robert Alessi:

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is available with a FAQ at: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL

History

This font is just the same as Alexey Kryukov’s beautiful Old Standard.1 In comparison to the previous releases of Old Standard, it includes new letters and some corrections:

  1. Small capitals for Roman, Greek and Cyrillic letters, in all three styles, Regular, Italic and Bold have been added. Small capitals, which were missing from Old Standard, were already in use a century ago in fine books which used font faces very similar to Old Standard. Typical use cases of small capitals were headers, current headings and in some books proper names.
  2. For the time being, a bold italic shape has been auto-generated. Of course, auto-generating shapes is not a satisfactory solution. However, it is better than using the font loader to emulate bold shapes. A real bold italic shape is planned in the versions of Old Standard to come.
  3. The letter G with caron above, that is: Ǧ (U+01E6, uppercase) and ǧ (U+01E7, lowercase) has been added. It is the only character missing from Old Standard that is needed in some of the accepted standards of romanization of classical Arabic.2
  4. Additionally, this release corrects the +ss06 feature provided by Old Standard. This feature is supposed to distinguish between regular and ‘curled’ beta (β/ϐ) and to print ‘curled’ beta (U+03D0) in medial position. This feature worked in most cases with the previous release of Old Standard. However, it failed if the beta is preceded by a vowel with an acute accent taken from the Greek extended Unicode block.

Why a new release of Old Standard?

At the time of writing, Old Standard was last updated six years ago. Being unable himself to contact the author, the writer, while in need to have new letters included in Old Standard and some issues addressed, took the decision to make a new release of Old Standard, while maintaining the hope that the author will one day resume the development of this typeface.

Reference web page (archived on Sept. 26, 2019)

http://thessalonica.org.ru/en/oldstandard.html

Documentation

Please refer to Alexey Kryukov’s documentation which is can be found here: http://mirrors.ctan.org/fonts/oldstandard/doc/oldstand-manual.pdf (CTAN) or here: http://thessalonica.org.ru/en/fonts-download.html (Alexey Kryukov’s web page).


  1. See https://github.com/akryukov/oldstand↩︎

  2. See for references the current documentation of the arabluatex package, sect. “Transliteration”.↩︎