RE: Unicode Cyrillic GHE DE PE TE in Serbian

From: Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com
Date: Mon Jan 10 2000 - 10:45:15 EST


I don't know how much value this can add to the discussion, and whose mill
this brings grist to, but I made a little enquiry with the fonts installed
on my PC to see what style of Cyrillic ge, de, pe and te they use.

The result is that the "Serbian" style is by far the most common (a 2 to 1
score, in this limited set of fonts):

"Russian" style, 5 fonts:
        avec-serifs: 3 (Bookman Old Style, Garamond, Times New Roman)
        sans-serifs: 2 (Arial (but note: PE is not n-like!); Arial Narrow)

"Serbian" style, 10 fonts:
        avec-serifs: 3 (Bitstream Cyberbit; Code2000; Courier New)
        sans-serifs: 5 (Arial Black; Impact; Lucida Sans Unicode; Tahoma;
Verdana)
        other styles: 2 (Comic Sans MS; Lucida Console)

(I wrote the string "gdpt", in italic Cyrillic, in Microsoft Word 97 using
different fonts and the language attributes. The language attribute, Serbian
or Russian, had no effect on the shape of the letters; maybe this would be
different on, say, Office 2000)

As a personal opinion, I don't like the careless implementation of Cyrillic
in the Arial family of fonts. Even sticking to Russian, it seems to me that
the "Serbian" style is more in the look-and-feel of sans-serifs fonts. In
fact, sans-serifs traditionally don't have a special italic style, the
italic attribute being just represented by slanting the letters.

Moreover, a font that uses an "m-like" TE should also use an "alpha-like" A.
Arial and Arial Narrow made the horrible choice of using the "regular" style
for some letters (e.g. "a") and the "italic" style for others (e.g. "t").
Moreover, the 3 Arial versions I have (regular, Narrow and Black) made
different choices with regards to Cyrillic italics, making it a problem to
use them together.

Ciao.
        Marco

P.S.: I wanted to send a bitmap of the Word document, but it exceeds mailing
list's size limit. Should anyone be interested, I can send it privately.



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