bugFree UCS Outline Fonts - Bugs: bug #23357, poor quality of Cyrillic

 
 

bug #23357: poor quality of Cyrillic

Submitted by:  Andrey V. Panov <panov>
Submitted on:  Mon 26 May 2008 04:27:51 AM UTC  
 
Category: character rangeSeverity: 3 - Normal
Item Group: glyph(s) uglyStatus: Duplicate
Privacy: PublicAssigned to: Steve White <Stevan_White>
Open/Closed: ClosedRelease: 2008-03-23

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Fri 12 Sep 2008 08:25:48 AM UTC, comment #6:

In release 20080912

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Project AdministratorIn charge of this item.
Mon 09 Jun 2008 04:21:25 AM UTC, comment #5:

Steve,

The accent for cyrillic short i and u also must be replaced. It was an obvious error of gs fonts to use usual breve for the letters. Usual breve used only in sans serif fonts.

Relying on unicode charts is not very useful for designing. Current shape of U+2116 is something mean between the old European (N + superscript o) and modern Russian style for this sign. As far as I know this sign is not used in other European countries now, they use abbrevations. From the other hand it in everyday use in Russia and ex-USSR countries and its shape in roman fonts is usually different (with bulbs).

For regularizing Cyrillic in Mono font you may use professional font from Paratype http://www.paratype.ru/primer/Primer_OT_TTF.zip or http://www.paratype.ru/primer/Primer_OT_CFF.zip as sample.

Andrey V. Panov <panov>
Sat 07 Jun 2008 08:20:09 AM UTC, comment #4:

Andrey,

A lot of work has been done on the Cyrillic ranges of FreeFont since the last release. In CVS, they have been completed in all the roman faces. Furthermore, I spent days improving the horizontal spacing of Cyrillic text in FreeFont.

So please don't think that nobody has paid attention to it. In fact, one concern is that so much effort has been put into it, and a global replacement might introduce a lot of problems. If you are interested enough, the FontForge sources are available for download from these pages. (I could even send you a TrueType file if you like.)

One big advantage of using the Tempora font would be to complete the italic faces. Of course, the typographic convention in Cyrillic is for the italic to be quite different, and I have been unsure of how some of the rarer letters should look.

As to simplicity...there are numerous consideratons here. For instance, Tempora has very different PostScript Blue values than does FreeFont, and I don't know how that will affect hinting. Also, FreeFont has used the standard breve accent to construct Cyrillic letters with a breve. Tempora uses a stylized breve (that I have seen before in Cyrillic types), which (unfortunately) has no individual Unicode character. I like the economy of building characters from components (but I'm not married to it).

I also notice that the extended Greek tonos in Tempora is wrong. It has become a political issue in Greece, and officially standardized, that tonos must be identical to an accent acute.
That isn't important for the Cyrillic, of course, but you can see how picky one has to be.

Beside that, the overall style of Tempora seems to be compatible with that of FreeFont, and the glyphs strikes me as being very attractive and readable.

As to uni2116, the Unicode standard
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2100.pdf
does not say this is the numero common to Cyrillic encodings. In older versions of FreeFont, its design was rather scattered, so I have recently re-built the glyph to be like the Unicode example. I will consider copying the stylized glyph from Tempora, however.

Thanks!

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Project AdministratorIn charge of this item.
Sat 07 Jun 2008 03:01:44 AM UTC, comment #3:

There are still a lot of issues in Serif-Regular and much more ones in other Serif typefaces. It is simpler to replace Cyrillic by existing one from Tempora font. Sans and Mono also have a number of flaws in Cyrillic so you may pay your attention to them. uni2116 is also widely used in ex-USSR countries and its shape should be modified in Serif.

Andrey V. Panov <panov>
Tue 03 Jun 2008 10:58:36 PM UTC, comment #2:

That is, bug report
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?22709
(and there is another about spacing in Cyrillic)

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Project AdministratorIn charge of this item.
Tue 03 Jun 2008 10:56:24 PM UTC, comment #1:

Hi, Andrey!

Thanks for your suggestion!

As you saw in the existing report on this issue, a great deal of work has been done on the Cyrillic range since the last release, to regularize the style, spacing and height.

But I'm still not very happy with the fact that some glyphs have slightly different designs from the others. Perhaps your suggestion is the key.

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Project AdministratorIn charge of this item.
Mon 26 May 2008 04:27:51 AM UTC, original submission:

Cyrillic in ghostscript fonts, which was the source for freefonts, has unacceptably low quality. Cyrillic in Serif should be replaced by one from Tempora LGC Unicode fonts (http://www.thessalonica.org.ru/en/fonts.html ) which are also ghostscript derivative, but with regularized Cyrillic.

Andrey V. Panov <panov>

 

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    Follow 3 latest changes.

    Date Changed By Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced By
    Fri 12 Sep 2008 08:25:48 AM UTCStevan_WhiteOpen/ClosedOpen=>Closed
    Tue 03 Jun 2008 10:56:24 PM UTCStevan_WhiteStatusNone=>Duplicate
      Assigned toNone=>Stevan_White

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