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!
|