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
---------

2023 December 12 (Robert Alessi, Antonis Tsolomitis) version 2.7
    * Added OldStandard-Math.
    
    * Added “oldstyle” numerals in regular and bold series.
    
    * Replaced open theta with closed theta in slot 035B and adjusted
      rules ss05 and ss06 accordingly.

2020 December 18 (Robert Alessi) Version 2.6

    * Added 2nd pointer to Alexey Kryukov's archived webpage.

    * Added and updated FONTLOG.txt (this file).

    * New file: OldStandard.fontspec. Slanted shapes for regular and bold are
      now available through the 'FakeSlant' feature of 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 <alexios at thessalonica dot org dot ru>.

N: Robert Alessi
E: alessi@robertalessi.net
W: http://www.robertalessi.net
D: Current maintainer of Old Standard