Bug 690896

Summary:	Ugly cyrillic letters in Century Schoolbook L
Product:	Fonts	Reporter:	Alexander Sapozhnikov <shoorick77>
Component:	free URW	Assignee:	Chris Liddell (chrisl) <chris.liddell>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX
Severity:	enhancement	CC:	christinedelight.top85, henry.stiles
Priority:	P4
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
URL:	http://shoorick.livejournal.com/990945.html
Customer:		Word Size:	---
Attachments:	Comparison of Schoolbook fonts GOST 3489.23-71 Regular font with several fixes Scanned few lines of text in Russian from book published in 1986

Description Alexander Sapozhnikov 2009-11-07 11:34:54 UTC

Century Schoolbook L contains ugly shapes of some cyrillic letters. These
letters significally differs from letters defined in Soviet Standard GOST
3489.23-71 and from letters in russian books typed with Shkolnaya (Century
Schoolbook).

Lowercase cyrillic letters is wider than latin ones.

Some cyrillic "short" letters (for example, Short I U+0419) contains wrong
shaped breve. Cyrillic breve must have another contrast: central part of breve
must be thinner than ends. Cyrillic breve ends must be with drops.

I wrote (in Russian) post in my blog about this bug:
http://shoorick.livejournal.com/990945.html
This post contains picture
http://www.ljplus.ru/img4/s/h/shoorick/compare_schoolbook.png where we can see
differences between several fonts: Shkolnaya by GOST 3489.23-71 (black), Century
Schoolbook L (brown), Schoolbook of unknown author (maroon) and Century by Agfa
Monotype Corporation (blue, only regular, without bold and italic).

I think better way is correct cyrillic letters according with GOST 3489.23-71
(official documents (national standards too) in Russia are not copyrighted).

Comment 1 Alexander Sapozhnikov 2009-11-07 11:38:40 UTC

Created attachment 5638 [details]
Comparison of Schoolbook fonts

Black letters — from GOST, brown — Century Schoolbook L, maroon — Schoolbook of
unknown author, blue — Century of Agfa Monotype Corp.

Comment 2 Alexander Sapozhnikov 2009-11-07 12:00:19 UTC

Created attachment 5639 [details]
GOST 3489.23-71

Printing Types. Type Family "Shkoljnaya" (for alphabets of Russian and Roman
graphic bases). Range of application. Design. Base line. Characters per 4
picas.

Comment 3 Alexander Sapozhnikov 2009-11-07 12:06:59 UTC

I can fix some letters (if it possible with FontForge) and send fixed files to
you or commit changes (if I'll get permissions for commit).

Comment 4 Alex Cherepanov 2009-11-07 16:20:06 UTC

Please attach modified fonts to the bug report.

Roman part of the font was created by URW, Cyrillic glyphs were
later added by Valek Filippov .

I also suspect that some of Cyrillic characters have wrong metrics.
It would be great if you can check this.

Comment 5 Alexander Sapozhnikov 2009-11-16 11:50:51 UTC

Created attachment 5677 [details]
Regular font with several fixes

Regular (Roman) font where some cyrillic letters was fixed; at least uppercase:
De, Zhe, I short, Ka; lowercase: be, de, zhe, i short, ka, ya. Added upper- and
lowercase Yat.

Comment 6 Alexander Sapozhnikov 2009-11-16 12:26:33 UTC

Created attachment 5678 [details]
Scanned few lines of text in Russian from book published in 1986

I scan a few pages with Russian letters from old book:
&#1060;&#1077;&#1076;&#1077;&#1088;&#1080;&#1082;&#1086;
&#1043;&#1072;&#1088;&#1089;&#1080;&#1072; &#1051;&#1086;&#1088;&#1082;&#1072;.
&#1048;&#1079;&#1073;&#1088;&#1072;&#1085;&#1085;&#1086;&#1077; (Federico
García Lorca. Selected works) published in Moscow in 1986. Letters from this
book appears heavier than in GOST and in Century Schoolbook L.

Comment 7 Chris Liddell (chrisl) 2013-07-12 14:57:17 UTC

After much deliberation, we concluded that the cyrillic glyphs were not of suitable quality for printing purposes. We have reverted to the "basic" fonts as URW+ release them, as a result.