path: root/FONTLOG.txt

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
---------
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 <alexios at thessalonica dot org dot ru>.