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Read more about Thessalonica for OpenOffice.org! |
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Read more about Thessalonica for Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP/2003! |
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Read more about Thessalonica for OpenOffice.org! |
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Read more about Thessalonica for Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP/2003! |
This page is devoted to multilingual fonts I am developing. The most important and actively developed project is my Old Standard font family.
Old Standard is my attempt to provide a high quality font, suitable for classical, biblical and medieval studies as well as for general-purpose typesetting in languages which use Greek or Cyrillic script, and thus representing a good companion for my Thessalonica package. The font is currently available in two shapes: regular and italic. Old Standard is still far from being finished, and yet it always covers a wide range of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters, as the image below can demonstrate:
Except various special characters, Old Standard supports many nice features, provided by OpenType. OpenType is a smart font rendering technology, that allows proper typographic treatment of complex scripts and advanced typographic effects for simpler scripts. In particular it allows to resolve many tasks, especially important for typesetting texts in "exotic" languages, such as printing accented combinations which are not available in the Unicode standard as precomposed characters. The number of OpenType-aware applications is still limited, but it is growing rapidly. So one of the intended tasks of the Old Standard font family is to attract the attention of philologists to this technology by demonstrating how useful "smart" OpenType fonts can be for their purposes.
Old Standard reproduces a specific type of Modern (classicist) style of serif typefaces, very commonly used in various editions of the late 19th and early 20th century, but almost completely abandoned later. However, this lettertype still has at least two advantages:
it can be considered a good choice for typesetting scientific papers, especially on social and humanitarian sciences, as its specific features are closely associated in the people's eyes with old books they learned on;
the most beautiful examples of Greek and Cyrillic lettertypes were all based on the classicist style, so that for those scripts "Modern" fonts are much more appropriate than any contemporary (e. g. Times-based) designs.
The name "Old Standard" was selected as opposed to the "Obyknovennaya Novaya" ("New Standard") typeface, widely used in the Soviet typography, which represents another, slightly different type of the same Modern style. The digital version of this font is now available from Paratype. Of course this name doesn't look very original, but it seems to be a good choice for a revival of the most common lettertype of the early 20th century.
The Old Standard font family is currently available in two formats, so that before downloading fonts you should consider with which software you are planning to use them:
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TrueType fonts, or, more precisely, OpenType fonts with TrueType outlines. These fonts use the file extension *.ttf, and under Windows they appear in a folder or on a disk using a dog-eared page icon with two overlapping "T's" (for TrueType); |
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OpenType fonts with PostScript outlines (also called OpenType-CFF), with an *.otf extension. The Windows icon for a PostScript-flavored OpenType font is a dog-eared page icon with an "O" (for OpenType). |
It is worth pointing out, that, despite of the old "TT" icon used by Windows to represent them, the TrueType fonts actually support the same set of advanced OpenType features as their OpenType-CFF counterparts.
Note that you can install both TrueType and OpenType-CFF versions alongside, as they use different naming conventions (the TrueType fonts have a "TT" suffix in their names). However, in most cases you will probably prefer the TrueType fonts, as this format was introduced long time ago and now is widely supported on various platforms and operational systems.
OpenType-CFF is a relatively new font format, which is sometimes preferred over TrueType for the purposes of the desktop publishing. A system-level support for this font format was first introduced in Windows 2000, but in practice it was poorly supported by Microsoft software until Office 2003 was released. Even now some problems still persist: the most important one is that in most applications kerning will work only for the first 256 characters in the font. The only exception are Adobe's desktop publishing applications (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop). I hope the situation will change in future, but now I can recommend installing the OpenType-CFF versions under Windows only if you a planning to use them with the Adobe software.
Note that there is no PostScript Type 1 version available. This is because Type 1 is an old 8-bit format, which doesn't support Unicode. Yes, modern rendering engines usually can assign Unicode codepoints to glyphs from a Type 1 font basing on their PostScript names, but this doesn't work very well for Greek, and especially for Private Use Aria. That's why releasing a Type 1 version of Old Standard would make no sense, as this would contradict to its basic scope as a multilingual font. On the other hand, I can hardly imagine such a situation where you would prefer a Type 1 font, although there is a good quality TTF version available. The only exception is TeX, where Type 1 font are really preferred. I have not adapted Old Standard to the TeX typesetting system yet, but if you would like to do this for your purposes, then I would recommend you using the excellent LCDF Typetools package by Eddie Kohler, which contains all utilities necessary for converting OpenType-CFF fonts to Type 1 and generating all additional files needed for TeX.
Finally, you also can download the FontForge sources of the Old Standard font family. Of course this package may be useful for you only if you have the FontForge font editor, as well as some other font editing utilities, and know how to use them.
Old Standard is freely available and may be used by anyone at no cost. It is released under the SIL Open Font License, a free and open source license that permits modification and redistribution.
To download Old Standard, go to the bottom of this page, where all download links are placed. Except the font files themselves, there is a PDF manual available, where you can find detailed instructions on how to install the fonts and use them effectively.
Tempora LGC Unicode was my first attempt to create a multilingual font supporting Latin, Greek (including polytonic characters) and Cyrillic scripts. This family is based on two well-known free typefaces similar to Adobe Times: Nimbus Roman No 9 L by URW (russified by Valek Filippov), and the Omega Serif family, developed by Yannis Charalambous. However, all basic components of the font, and especially its Greek and Cyrillic parts, have suffered serious modifications, so that currently Tempora LGC Unicode represents an independent typeface, quite different from its predecessors.
Currently I am not planning to develop this family further, as I am tired from Times-styled fonts. I prefer to concentrate on enhancing Old Standard, which has more elegant design, and in general seems much more promising. However, in case you are interested in Tempora LGC Unicode, you still can download it here. Like Old Standard, Tempora LGC Unicode is available in several formats (TrueType, OpenType-CFF, FontForge sources), but TrueType font files are unhinted, and so they would probably look bad on screen unless you have enabled font antialiasing. So the preferred format for this typeface is OpenType-CFF: use it, if only your software allows this.
In this section you can find download links pointing to various font packages, referenced in this page, as well as to font-specific documentation. Note that files listed below may be available under several different licenses; so you should follow the link pointing to each particular license and read it carefully before redistributing or modifying anyone of this files.
| License | Typeface | Version | Date | Package type | File |
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Old Standard | 1.0 | 2007/01/28 | TrueType font files | oldstand-1.0.ttf.zip |
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Old Standard | 1.0 | 2007/01/28 | OpenType-CFF font files | oldstand-1.0.otf.zip |
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Old Standard | 1.0 | 2007/01/28 | FontForge sources | oldstand-1.0.src.zip |
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Old Standard | 1.0 | 2007/01/28 | PDF manual | oldstand-manual.pdf |
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Old Standard | 1.0 | 2007/01/28 | PDF manual (XeTeX sources) | oldstand-manual.src.zip |
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Tempora LGC Unicode | 0.2 | 2005/10/26 | OpenType-CFF font files | tempora-lgc.otf.zip |
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Tempora LGC Unicode | 0.2 | 2005/10/26 | TrueType font files | tempora-lgc.ttf.zip |
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Tempora LGC Unicode | 0.2 | 2005/10/26 | FontForge sources | tempora-lgc.src.zip |