Old Standard

License

Old Standard

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

Old Standard Math

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

email: alessi@roberalessi.net / atsol@aegean.gr
website: https://sr.ht/~ralessi/oldstandard/
development: https://git.sr.ht/~ralessi/oldstandard
comments, feature requests, bug reports: https://todo.sr.ht/~ralessi/oldstandard

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:

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.
A bold italic shape was first auto-generated in 2019. Of course, auto-generating shapes was not a satisfactory solution. Since then, the characters have been reworked manually.
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
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.
Open theta has been replaced with closed theta in slot 03B8 and rules ss05 and ss06 have been adjusted accordingly.
Oldstyle numerals: These have been designed by Antonis Tsolomitis for regular and bold series and can be selected by RawFeature=onum. (Those for italic and bolditalic have been designed by R. Alessi.)
Math Font: This is a major and long-awaited enhancement to Old Standard. The math font has been designed by Antonis Tsolomitis from an old French book published by Gauthier-Villars that used a font similar to Old Standard for Greek and a Bodoni font for Latin. As both Bodoni and Old Standard were “romantic” faces, it is hoped that they match up nicely, even if this remains to be proven… Two integrals are provided: a romantic one, which is selected by default, and an upright version, which can be selected with StylisticSet=2.

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).

See https://github.com/akryukov/oldstand ↩
See for references the current documentation of the arabluatex package, sect. “Transliteration”. ↩