From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Sat Mar 17 2007 - 12:27:56 CST
Alexej Kryukov wrote:
> I just noticed that standard system fonts (TNR, Arial, Courier New)
> have been greatly extended in Windows Vista and now cover virtually
> all Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters currently defined in
> Unicode. Very nice so far, but the design of some new characters
> (especially Old Cyrillic ones) is just terrible. It would be a
> pity if it never gets improved...
Members of the Microsoft internationalisation team are subscribed to the Unicode list, so
I'm sure they will bring your message to the attention of the appropriate people at MS.
I have not seen the Old Cyrillic extensions to the Windows core fonts, but I am not
surprised to hear that they are 'terrible'. I do not believe it is either possible to
adequately represent these characters in the styles of those typefaces or desirable to
try. The presence of glyphs for these characters in the core fonts should be seen as a
fallback mechanism, a means to ensure minimal recognisable display of such characters if
they occur in text set in these fonts, which is a very different thing from recommending
these fonts as appropriate to the display of Old Church Slavonic or other texts
incorporating these characters. I firmly believe that the only way to correctly display
Old Cyrillic texts is in fonts whose entire Cyrillic glyph set conforms to the conventions
of one of the pre-Petrine historical styles.
Maybe the forms of old Cyrillic letters in the Windows core fonts could be improved, as
you suggest, but they would never be something that I would want to use in displaying
historical Slavonic texts, because the basic style of the fonts is inappropriate.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC tiro@tiro.com Do not begin to paddle unless you intend always to paddle. - St Jean de Brébeuf, instructions for missionaries, 1637
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