Sat 26 Nov 2011 04:49:40 PM UTC, comment #1:
Alessandro,
It may be that I'm missing something, so I'll leave this open for a while, just in case. But from everything you sent so far, I would have to say we have strayed beyond our fields of expertise.
The issue with the size of the balls (or call them bulbs) was dispensed with in the other bug report. This is the letter designer's choice; it is based on visual weight. I reviewed all the letters you pointed out, and to my eye, the sizes of the existing bulbs in FreeSerif appears carefully chosen and well balanced.
Here we have a picture of some text in a very nice font.
You have circled several letters with bulbs. Each is rather different in several ways from the form in FreeSerif. The style of this face is overall substantially different from that used in FreeSerif. Look at the serifs on the 'em'! You point out the 'jot' in this face has no ball at all.
It comes down to FreeSerif isn't like some other font. Well, sure! That's why we have multiple fonts! That's a good thing!
These are stylistic issues, that vary from one typeface to another. I deny that any of these are matters of right and wrong. It is easy to find examples that look very much like FreeSerif, and examples that are not at all like the image or FreeSerif.
As to the presence of balls being dubious -- sorry one example of a different font isn't going to do it. I know I can find other common fonts that feature them.
In a sense, I'm pleased that these discussions have devolved to such delicate typographic questions. I read that to mean the face is otherwise quite good!
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Thu 24 Nov 2011 01:25:50 PM UTC, original submission:
Hi Steve
Letters who usually have balls in Cyrillic:
MAINSTREAM LETTERS: DJE (CAPITAL ONLY), ZE; ZHE, JE (CAPITAL ONLY), KA, LE, LJE, U, SHORT U and ES. As far as DJE and JE are concerned, the presence of balls in small forms is dubious, even if in FreeSerif it seems so. Also notice ZE in FreeSerif doesn't feature a ball (beneath).
ARCHAIC LETTERS: OMEGA, KSI, PSI, IZHITSA, IZHITSA WITH DOUBLE GRAVE, UK, OMEGA WITH TITLO, OT, KOPPA, MONOGRAPH UK (CAPITAL ONLY), BROAD OMEGA, NEUTRAL YER, YN.
My question is: ought the balls to be equal (of course one size for small and another for capital forms)? At the moment, the size varies, I don't know if there's one criterion indeed.
My modest contribution is providing you with a printed Serbian text (don't mind the Russian BE): small JE (DJE doesn't appear but its tail is identical to JE) doesn't feature any ball, but on the other hand, ZE does.
Greetings
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