Old Standard Font Family

Old Standard was intended as a multilingual font family suitable for biblical, classical and medieval studies as well as for general-purpose typesetting in languages which use Greek or Cyrillic script. The font is currently available in three shapes: regular, italic and bold. Old Standard is still far from being finished, and yet it already covers a wide range of Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters, as the image below can demonstrate. Beginning from version 2.0 it also supports early Cyrillic letters and signs (including those added in Unicode 5.1) and thus can be used for texts containing fragments in Old Slavonic and Church Slavonic languages.

In addition to its support for various special characters, Old Standard also implements 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.

Origin and Design

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.

Note on available formats

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:

	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);
	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.

Terms of Use

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 my font download 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.