4                             & S  & S  &    &   &   &    &    &    &    & 4  '   '3    '3    '3    '3                                                   =/  B                                                                Intro to version 2

I have been interested in Cyrillic typography for several years, so I was pretty excited when I downloaded Tony Janick's adaptation of Cyrillic to Adobe's version of ITC Italia. What we know of today as Cyrillic is descended from Old Slavonic. The face is credited to St. Cyril who is also responsible for introducing that part of the world to Christianity. We now know that Cyril was more likely responsible for Golgothic, but what the heck. It is also worth noting that the Eastern Orthodox Church managed to keep printing presses out of Russia for almost 100 years. (They may have understood all-too-well the connection between the rapid spread of Lutheranism and Luther's German bible, printed using that newfangled movable type.)

The characters of Cyrillic include Greek, Latin, and Hebrew roots. Cyrillic as we know it today is the result of the Westernophilic notions of Peter the Great, the Russian Tsar who created St. Petersberg on a swamp which happened to be the westernmost point of his empire. Among his deeds (which included a tax on beards), Peter imported some type mongers from Holland who were ordered to simplify the alphabet. Their attempts to understand the alphabet are largely responsible for oddities such as the "backwards R" and other characters that appear to be contortions of letters in our familiar Latin alphabet. They =are= contortions of some letters in our familiar Latin alphabet! Cyrillic was further simplified by Lenin in 1917. Stalin then complicated it slightly further when he adapted the alphabet (and added some special characters) to be used by all Russian republics--including those which used other alphabets (such as Latin or Arabic). In addition these transliterative uses, the Cyrillic alphabet  is used by several other languages. These languages are Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian. Each of these adds a few special characters to the basic, 33-character alphabet. Observers of Cyrillic and Old Slavonic typography will note that several of the styles are "ultra-condensed." This is, in part, a reaction to the fact that Cyrillic does not have a lower case as we know it in Latin-based languages. Our lower case came from a merger of two different writing forms. In the case of Cyrillic, such a merger was never attempted, and the lower case is basically something known as "minuscule" (with the upper case known as "majuscule"). These words are Latin for the obvious: Cyrillic lower case consists primarily of small versions of the capital letters, not a different, narrower alphabet as is the case with the Latin-based languages. This makes printed Cyrillic look a lot like type that is printed in Caps/Small Caps in English.

Those who are especially fascinated by this subject (and it's not hard to be), and have internet access, may wish to subscribe to the RUSTEX listserv. Although nominally set up to support use of the TeX language with Russian, it is a vast and wonderful repository (and e-mail discussion group) of all things to do with Russian and computers. To subscribe, send e-mail to Dmitri Vulis: dlv@cunyvms1.bitnet.
 --ari

-------------------------------
The original version of this font didn't work with my printer. I imported the font into Fontographer 3.2, saved it, and it worked just fine. While I was at it, I decided to put some of my lack of knowledge to work and fixed a few discrepancies on the shapes of some of the characters in the font. Since neither of us are (or at least, I am not) terribly facile (yet) with curve manipulation or Fontographer, this is still far from a perfect font. On the other hand, maybe it's not so bad, either. Hopefully, other people will follow Tony's example and either fix this one further, or put more such fonts in the public domain. To avoid confusion, I have renamed the font "ItaliaCyrillic". If you have the font "Cyrillic", then you have Tony's original version, as well. Please let me know if there are any technical problems with this font.

I have been to confused and time-constrained to examine Tony's character set to see how it corresponds with that of the commercial Cassady & Greene fonts, nor have I looked at the new vector encodings that will be supported by Apple's Russian Information System (or, for that matter, at the encodings for the forthcoming Adobe Minion Cyrillic). In other words, documents composed using this font will probably read wrong if you decide to use a commercial Russian font, or if you switch to Apple's Russian version of the Mac operating system. If I ever find the time to go through the various standards, or if it is ever clear which standards will be useful to the casual Mac users, I have every intention of going back and re-encoding this. For now, what you have is what Tony put together and documented.

The sole intent of this font is to provide a way for people interested in Russian to work on their computers in Russian without having to purchase additional software and/or fonts. Given that none of the alternatives I mentioned above are widely available and are inconsistent with each other, I am in total agreement with Tony that this is a neat project and am looking forward to seeing future incarnations of the font.

All restrictions (and encouragements) stated by Tony below should still be considered in effect.

Ari Davidow, BMUG, 27 June 1991
ari@well.sf.ca.us


---------------------
Howdy Comrades!

This is a new Cyrillic type 1 Laser font brought to you by the Tony Jonick of the Moo Prometheus League (Bringing Fire to the Cows!) It was created in Fontographer 3.1.  Cyriltalia

Basically, I needed a laser face to use for communicating with pen pals in the good ol USSR, and couldnt find a free one. So I made one up.

If you want to see the character set, quit and load in Cyriltalia.

We all have some shareware we never get around to paying for. We all mean to get around to it, but . . . . Well, I figure if youve got a guilty conscience, one way to alleviate it is to add to the general library of Macintosh software.

If you are one of those people who has to pay for things and has the cash, I ask that you make a donation to:

Peace Links 
747 8th St., SE
Washington, DC 2003

They are an excellent group which hooked me up with my Soviet pen pals, and work for peace through personal global inter-communication. They can get you pen-pals who speak English or Russian (If youve got the time, learn Russian. Its fun, its clean, and it doesnt rot your teeth.)

This face is for free use and distribution, so long as it is distributed with ALL of the accompanying documents, and remains unaltered. I have no problem with distribution on disks for sale by non-profit groups like BMUG (ultra-cool groovies), but I would prefer that it not be sold by for profit companies unless they donate some money to Peace Links.

Here is the character Chart (you will want to load the font and display this chart in that font for it to make sense):

A	A	B	B	C	C	D	D
E	E	F	F	G	G	H	H
I	I	J	J	K	K	L	L
M	M	N	N	O	O	P	P
Q	Q	R	R	S	S	T	T
U	U	V	V	W	W	X	X
Y	Y	Z	Z	{	{	}	}								
		_	_				
a	a	b	b	c	c	d	d
e	e	f	f	g	g	h	h
i	i	j	j	k	k	l	l
m	m	n	n	o	o	p	p
q	q	r	r	s	s	t	t
u	u	v	v	w	w	x	x
y	y	z	z	[	[	]	]
		-	-				
	
Most  Keys are self explanatory, but:  and  are shift & plain option-A;  and  are shift & plain option-O; the  and  are Shift-Option 1 and 2; the  and  are option 1 and 2.

Legal Moo-Crap: I am not responsible for any problems if your computer blows up, loses data, or turns into a black hole and sinks into the center of the planet taking your mold collection with it. I make no guarantee, express or implied, that this font will clean the floor or get you into the sack with that sexy person youve been ogling. I simply suggest that if you use this font, have a clean system, and limit you font menu to under 300 faces at any one time. I am also not responsible for people who use this font to write nasty letters to President Bush, calling him a genocidal maniac who doesnt give a damn about schools, and who sign their letters Ivan the Terrible. Okay?
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