http://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/cyr-rfx/00index.en.html
It is also available in ftp space as
ftp://ftp.inp.nsk.su/pub/BINP/X11/fonts/cyr-rfx/00index.en.html
"CYR-RFX" means CYRillic Raster Fonts for X.
The aim of CYR-RFX is to create a collection of quality cyrillic
versions of standard raster fonts for X-Window.
The first task was to create russified versions of a few
LucidaTypewriter fonts to use them in xterm and text editors.
Later the task was extended -- to create such a collection of fonts
which could cover most X-Window applications. The following apps are
treated as most important: xterm, text editors, Netscape, XV, LyX,
window managers and GUIs (fvwm/ (The fonts which are used were found in a trivial way:
"grep -i font" on all files from /etc/X11 and
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults dirs, plus using
strings|less on program executables and shared libraries.)
One of the goals of CYR-RFX is the development of accurate
cyrillic versions of standard X fonts.
The Cronyx package (the fonts/cyrillic/ dir in the XFree86
distribution) presents some problems. First, it contains fonts not
from X, but, it seems, from Windows 3.x (see [CRONYX]).
Second, these fonts aren't the most aestetic and eye-pleasing. Third,
the metrics in many of these fonts are bad, so the text rendered in
different fonts (both in a mix of Cronyx/ISO8859-1 and in Cronyx only)
looks "ugly". (It is due to wrong values of FONT_ASCENT
properties, and the mismatch of glyphs' heights in different fonts with
a same value of PIXEL_SIZE -- for example, in
courier-medium-r-normal--14 and times-medium-r-normal--14.)
The author is far from slanding on the Cronyx fonts -- some time ago
it was the only choice, and they helped very much, but now something
better is required.
The second set of cyrillic fonts, known to the author (this set can
be named as "75dpi.koi8-1" [75DPI_KOI8]) is made by adding
cyrillic glyphs to the standard X fonts. But, first, it doesn't include
the Lucida/ Vector fonts (TrueType and Postscript) are ideal for large
resolutions, but for low resolutions (xterm, text editors, www, window
titles etc.) the hand-tuned raster fonts are much better. They are used
for these purposes not only in X, but also in Windows and MacOS.
Additionally, the most available TrueType fonts are those which are
distributed with MS Windows and are part of MS Fontpack
[MS_FONTPACK]. But, despite that they are "free", they are
not free software. So, they are virtually unacceptable for use in
Unices, since, for example, they can't be included into distributions
due to weird format (.exe-files) and their very "jesuitical" license
(see [MS_EULA]).
Currently all the iso8859-1 fonts from misc/, plus
Lucida, LucidaTypewriter, Times, Helvetica and Courier from
75dpi/ are cyrillized. The NewCenturySchoolbook and
100dpi/ fonts are taken into account for future. This choice of
fonts is conditioned by their most frequent usage.
First the aim was to make glyphs from koi8-1 encoding
[KOI81] (including "Euro"), later ukrainian glyphs from
koi8-ru [KOI8RU] were added, and, finally, as less
needed, the rest cyrillic glyphs from windows-1251/WGL4
[WIN1251,WGL4]. The author doesn't have a task to
make all cyrillic glyphs from the Unicode standard -- only the most
used.
The misc/ and 75dpi/lut[RB]S{08,19,24}.bdf fonts have
the following glyphs (which are present in koi8-1 and in Adobe
standard encoding) added:
In other fonts these chars were already present as "unencoded
glyphs".
Monospace LucidaTypewriter and Courier fonts have linedrawing chars
in the range 0x00-0x1F added, so that these fonts can be used in
xterm and alikes (the author prefers lutRS12).
Some LucidaTypewriter fonts have also "images" of control chars from
0x00-0x1F plus 0x7F (delete) added. The goal is
that in those applications, which display text not interpreting control
chars (text editors, xfte for example), and in xterm when printing
chars from this range without special meaning, something would appear,
instead of absolutely nothing.
In standard Lucida and LucidaTypewriter fonts, and in most fonts
from misc/ the DEFAULT_CHAR property
[BDF,XLFD] has a value of 0. So, in the
LucidaTupewriter and
misc/{10x20, Currently the following encodings are present:
The winlatin-1 encoding (also known as cp-1252 and
windows-1252) is a superset of iso8859-1, and contains
additional glyphs in the range 0x80-0x9F. Sometimes web-pages
crafted under Windows in cp-1252 are transferred with
charset=iso-8859-1 header [CZY_CP1252].
The 0-127 range is identical to ISO8859-1 in all
encodings.
Since the ready-to-use font files are generated programmatically,
other encodings can be added easily.
All the fonts have the same names as standard ones, with a few
changes.
Such approach enables to ease cyrillization of most standard
programs, which usually use either wildcards without encoding, or
aliases like "7x14", "fixed" etc. In most cases it is sufficient to
place a directory with cyrillic fonts into beginning of FontPath, and
these fonts will be used instead of iso8859-1 ones
automatically.
Mainly the standard Adobe names were used. It applies to glyphs
from 0x20-0x7E, to cyrillic glyphs (afiiNNNNN), to glyphs
from ISO8859-1 range 0xA0-0xBF, to "Euro" and
additional punctuation from Adobe standard encoding range. The
"number" sign was named
"afii61352", the "rouble" sign was named "rouble". The
linedrawing chars got the names ldXXXXX, as was suggested by the
75dpi/tech14.bdf (-DEC-Terminal-*-DEC-DECtech) font, the
0x00 is "null", and the rest glyphs from 0x00-0x1F
are named "ctrlX", where "X" is a char with the same code plus
0x40. The 0x7F glyph is named "delete". The non-breaking
space char 0xA0 is named space, as Adobe standard encoding
[AGL] suggests.
Glyphs which don't have Adobe name were named uniXXXX
according to [UGN].
The fonts are created in two steps.
First the standard .bdf font from XFree86 distribution (the
xc/fonts/bdf/*/ dirs) is taken, than cyrillic and other missing
glyphs are added (the main russian -- in the koi8 positions,
others -- in the relatively randomly selected positions from
0x80-0x9F; it is named a "source encoding"). The fonts are
edited with a slightly modified XmBDFEd 3.0 (sometimes assisted by
XPaint).
Than a special assembler program written in Perl (it is called
cvtbdf.pl) reads both the new file with cyrillics and a standard
ISO8859-1 file, and creates a file with a font in requested encoding
(koi8-1, windows-1251 etc.).
Since XmBDFEd 3.0 handles the headers of some fonts in a "too
intellectual" manner, the headers (and the DWIDTH parameter for
monospace fonts) are taken from an ISO8859-1 font. During this process
the "FONT" header is modified, and the values of FNDRY,
CHARSET_REGISTRY and CHARSET_ENCODING properties are
replaced. Additionally, the COPYRIGHT2, SOURCEDATE and
ASSEMBLER properties are being added.
This is covered in §3 in detail, but briefly, the glyphs should
correspond to the style of the font as close as possible.
I just got tired of very "rough" and unergonomic fonts (plus very
unesthetic ones). Since definitely nobody tried to fix the
situation, I decided to do it myself.
I began creating/cyrillizing raster fonts in the end of 80s on
BK-0010, Yamaha MSX and AT286 computers, so the gained experience gave
me right to predict a good result.
[5013]
[6X13README]
[75DPI_KOI8]
[ACHE]
[AGL]
[ATYPE]
[BASK_C]
[BDF]
[BH_DOUF]
[CRONYX]
[CZY_CP1252]
[CZY_CYR]
[EURO_A]
[EURO_H]
[EURO_M]
[HELV_C]
[KOI81]
[KOI8R]
[KOI8RU]
[KOI8U]
[LUCIDA_FO]
[MSCDS]
[MS_EULA]
[MS_FONTPACK]
[MUSAEV]
[OFFTYPESANS]
[PISKA]
[TIMES_C]
[U0400]
[UGN]
[WIN1251]
[WGL4]
[XLFD]
§1.6. What are the aims of CYR-RFX project?
§1.7. Cyrillic fonts for X already exist (Cronyx for example), so what's the need in CYR-RFX?
§1.8. TrueType rasterisers for X have recently appeared, and there is a plethora of cyrillic .ttf fonts, so what's the need in CYR-RFX?
§1.9. Which fonts are included in the CYR-RFX?
§1.10. Which set of glyphs and which encodings are included in CYR-RFX?
dagger, daggerdbl, guilsinglleft, guilsinglright, emdash,
endash, ellipsis, quotesinglbase, quotedblbase, grave,
quotesingle, quotedblleft, quotedblright, tilde, florin,
perthousand, bullet, trademark, circumflex; OE, oe, Scaron,
scaron, Zcaron, zcaron, Ydieresis.
Encoding Glyphs included koi8-1 complete koi8-ru letters, single linedrawing and some special glyphs only windows-1251 complete ibm-cp866 letters, single linedrawing and some special glyphs only iso8859-5 complete mac-cyrillic without Mac-specific glyphs like "Delta" and "infinity" winlatin-1 complete iso8859-15 complete §1.11. How fonts in CYR-RFX are named?
-adobe-times-medium-r-normal--14-140-75-75-p-74-winlatin-1
the alias
-adobe_winlatin_1-times-medium-r-normal--14-140-75-75-p-74-iso8859-1
is generated.
-misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-koi8-1
§1.12. How the names of glyphs (which are specified in STARTCHAR) were chosen?
§1.13. How the CYR-RFX fonts are created?
§1.14. Which princilpes are used when creating cyrillic glyphs for CYR-RFX?
§1.15. Why are YOU doing cyrillization? Are you an expert in fonts?
§2. Using CYR-RFX fonts in applications
Yet to be written...
§3. Glyph design principles used in CYR-RFX project
Yet to be written and translated...
Bibliography
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/devrelations/devtechnotes/pdffiles/5013.cyrillic_font_spec.pdf
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/ucs-fonts.tar.gz
/README
http://www.kiarchive.ru/pub/cyrillic/x11/fonts/75dpi_koi8.tar.gz
http://nagual.pp.ru/~ache/koi8.html
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/typeforum/glyphlist.txt
http://www.adobe.com/type/
http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/P/P_365.html
([ATYPE] -> A-Z type index -> B -> Baskerville Cyrillic)
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/devrelations/devtechnotes/pdffiles/5005.bdf_spec.pdf
http://cajun.cs.nott.ac.uk/wiley/journals/epobetan/pdf/volume6/issue3/bigelow.pdf
http://www.kiarchive.ru/pub/cyrillic/x11/fonts/
ftp://ftp.kiarchive.ru/pub/cyrillic/x11/fonts/
(see also README.set file)
http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html#CP1252
http://czyborra.com/charsets/cyrillic.html
http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1140.html
http://www.fonts.com/hp/euro/Eurodev1.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/faq/faq12.htm
http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/P/P_361.html
([ATYPE] -> A-Z type index -> H -> Helvetica Cyrillic)
http://www.inp.nsk.su/~byrganov/publish/koi8-1/koi8-1.ru.html
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc1489.txt
http://cad.ntu-kpi.kiev.ua/multiling/koi8-ru/
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2319.txt
http://cad.ntu-kpi.kiev.ua/multiling/koi8-u/
http://members.aol.com/willadams/lucida.txt
(Probably the best reference will be [Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, "The design of Lucida: an integrated family of types for electronic literacy", in Text processing and document manipulation, ed. J. C. Van Vliet, Cambridge University Press, (1986)], but I don't have access to it.)
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/default.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/eula.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/faq/faq8.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/Misc/cpyright.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/default.htm
http://www.paratype.com/library/newstyles.asp?fontcode=TM_OTS
http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb17-2/tb51pisk.pdf
http://www-hep.fzu.cz/~piska/
http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/P/P_354.html
([ATYPE] -> A-Z type index -> T -> Times Ten Cyrillic)
http://charts.unicode.org/Unicode.charts/normal/U0400.html
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/typeforum/unicodegn.html
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/sbcs/1251.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OTSPEC/WGL4.htm
ftp://ftp.x.org/pub/R6.4/xc/doc/hardcopy/XLFD/xlfd.PS.gz