From: Alexej Kryukov (akrioukov@newmail.ru)
Date: Sat Mar 17 2007 - 15:53:41 CST
On Saturday 17 March 2007 21:27, you wrote:
> 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.
John,
although you are right that the Slavonic style should be preferred
for Old Cyrillic texts, implementing the whole set of historical
Cyrillic letters in the Roman style does make a sense even for
typographic purposes. In fact, typesetting at least some types
of historical documents (Old Russian, if not Church Slavonic)
with modern fonts is a well established tradition, and many
editions, published in Russia and Soviet Union, were set by
this way. This practice is especially reasonable in those cases
where publishers decide to simplify the orthography of the original
text, preserving, however, some archaic letters.
That's why I think reasonably good romanized forms are possible
for most of historical Cyrillic characters. You may have a look at
the recent Cyrillic proposal by Michael Everson which contains
both the acceptable reference glyphs and several examples of
historical characters used in various printing styles. The
actual problem is just that the developers of Vista fonts have
based their design on the current code chart, whose reference
glyphs for historical Cyrillic are mostly bad (nobody complained
on this until recently, us most font designers ignored those
characters anyway, so that implementing them was left to a few
enthusiasts).
-- Regards, Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov at newmail dot ru> Moscow State University Historical Faculty
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Mar 17 2007 - 15:57:37 CST