Cyrillic support

[glebd]

The font is very nice as it is, thank you very much. But it would be great to have Cyrillic support.

[belluzj]

OK, I put it on my TODO list. The only problem is that I don't know the Cyrillic alphabet at all. To keep a consistent look I will have to study it a little and look at other fonts and people's handwriting, so it will take some time to be completed :)

[belluzj]

I have started to work on it this afternoon :) I decided to start by doing the same glyph coverage as PT Mono (which, if I understood well, was designed by and for Cyrillic users). I still have some letters to add to reach that goal, but I have already drawn enough to display text from a Russian article on Wikipedia. If you have some time, can you tell me if it's readable enough, if there are some shocking character shapes or any detail that bothers you? I will release later a .ttf for testing, when I have drawn more letters, maybe in the next weeks.

[JIghtuse]

Looks fine for me. I'm not so expert on fonts, I ask my friends for more feedback.

[danil]

If you have some time, can you tell me if it's readable enough

looks good

[morhetz]

@belluzj That looks awesome. I've noticed some problems with "ю" character as horizontal crossbar is to low, though it could be hinting artefact. Any hope for early access sfd?

[belluzj]

I pushed a few minutes ago the almost final .sfd for the regular/straight version. You can download the test release :) Of course I am eager to receive comments and criticism about the letter shapes, because I really never used this alphabet, so feel free to tell me anything, even if it seems obvious. Thanks!

[morhetz]

@belluzj That's great. Capitals are almost ok, and I've tried making fixes and changes to lowercase part. Could you check it out? I'm not best at describing things, so it'll be easier just to compare fonts and check the difference.
Since I don't write other cyr-languages than Russian, changes are made only to base cyrillics.
The only thing that disturbs me is "Ж" letter: while it looks ok on screen rendering, glyph by itself is too fancy.

[madfriend]

@morhetz your version looks great from a quick glance. Have you considered making bold & italic types?

[belluzj]

@madfriend I will draw the missing styles just after I integrate the changes from @morhetz to this repository. Until now I did not find time to do it, but it's definitively on my TODO list.

[morhetz]

@madfriend Thanks. Talking about bold and italics, I would probably agree with @belluzj:
Bold will come when I know that the shapes are right, and italic will be another story since it seems that the shapes completely change.
Though I could try starting progress on italics it takes much time as I suck at FontForge.

[belluzj]

@morhetz I followed most of your suggestions, here is the new result.

[belluzj]

I started working on italics too, from various pictures of Russian school handwriting and various fonts (some with serifs and Consolas without serifs). I want it to feel almost hand-written, and it should be suitable and leggible for long blocks of text (comments). Same here, any comment on this work-in-progress is welcome. Here is a preview:

[glebd]

This looks absolutely gorgeous!

[madfriend]

Looks good. However, the "и" part of the lowercase "й" letter looks lower that it should be (comparing to the regular).

[morhetz]

At first sight italics looks pretty ok despite that "ф", "м" and "ж" are definitely wrong
I'll try to make some modifications if you wouldn't mind

[morhetz]

I've updated same repo with modified version of italics. Changed glyphs are г, д, ж/Ж, к, л, м, ф, ъ, я/Я. I've also fixed ж/Ж and я/Я in the regular typeface. One thing I've mentioned is there is some kind of double slanted bug related to glyphs with combination signs like Й.
So here is the result preview

[morhetz]

I've just realized that I forgot to mention: some glyphs in Regular type such as ж/Ж was also changed

[belluzj]

Thank you very much for your help :) In fact you did mention it. I will review your changes soon!

[belluzj]

@morhetz I tried to follow your recommendations and updated the font, thanks again for your time :)

To all Cyrillic users of this thread: please have a last look at the font! It also features some non-Russian Cyrillic characters, so all the people from eastern Europe who can say a few words about the legibility or glyph coverage are welcome :) The next step for me will be to create bold versions, so I would prefer to start on a good base. Thanks in advance!

PDF file of this preview

FantasqueSansMono-Regular.ttf
FantasqueSansMonoRegItalic.ttf

[danil]

like it)

[jozsefk9]

Thanks so much for this amazing font! I really like it and it's so nice to see a support for so many different kind of languages, even Cyrillic on the way! Good, great. I have tested your TTFs I found in your last post, with Serbian language and it looks good. Not bad at all. The Cyrillic one. But Serbian Latin (which is the same as Croatian for example) got few problems. At least for me it looks like a problem. Characters Š, Č, Ž, and even Ć could touch some of the characters in the line above if it happens they are directly under let's say lowercase p, g or j. You can see two screenshots (24pt and 10pt):

1. http://s584.photobucket.com/user/jozsefk9/media/24pt_zpse1389f65.png.html
2. http://s584.photobucket.com/user/jozsefk9/media/10pt_zpse7eb7903.png.html
   There is a zoom option if needed.

[belluzj]

Ok, yes it is a problem. However I don't believe I could reduce the size of the capital letters or the size of accents, so instead I suppose I will ship a version with a bigger line height especially for people who need accented capitals. Thank you very much for your report :)

[jozsefk9]

Last night I remembered that Macedonian Cyrillic (they don't even have Latin) got the same issue as Serbian Latin and Croatian, with two characters only: capital Ѓ and Ќ. Have a look:

1. http://s584.photobucket.com/user/jozsefk9/media/makedonian10pt_zpsd38c882c.png.html
2. http://s584.photobucket.com/user/jozsefk9/media/makedonian24pt_zpsb90f0c45.png.html

[morhetz]

Hi, @belluzj. Nice to see progress on this.
I would mostly doubt on lower «я» (capital is ok), both regular and italics. It feels unnaturally shaped.
At first sight lower italics «м» seemed a little bit too curly for me, but that didn't bother much and I got used to it very quickly.

[mrjovanovic]

@belluzj
Re: sr_RS & mk_MK Cyrillic in the Italic form

Serbian and Macedonian Cyrillic actually looks different from it's Russian equivalent in the letters bgdpt (бгдпт).
Here is a quick summary image from Wikipedia, which has a whole section about it. The biggest problem is the italic t which looks completely out of place in Serbian:

I agree with @morhetz on the я lowercase form (the extension to the left seems a tad too long), but also the з character seems a bit flat and too rounded than usual. This is minor however, I could get used to it.

[belluzj]

@mrjovanovic Thanks, I will consider using opentype features or releasing two versions of the font.

@ALL I'm sorry that I'm not making any progress on this right now, but all your comments will be very useful when I get back to this project. Thanks again :)

[mrjovanovic]

@belluzj
Take your time - the font is fantastic, and your work is greatly appreciated! :))

Yes, I think one would have to use OpenType features at the moment, or at least that's what the other big free fonts familis (DejaVu, Ubuntu, GNUFreeFont) are using.

[belluzj]

@mrjovanovic Does this look ok?

[mrjovanovic]

Great work! I really like the т, д and ш characters. A few points:

• The g (г) looks awkward, is the line on top straight?
• I'm not sure if this was just a spelling error, or a more serious issue - the d and b are switched in the text. So it says "подољшава" instead of "побољшава", and "хидриба" instead of "хибрида". I assume it's an issue with the translation, and hope the forms aren't switched.

Thanks so much!

[belluzj]

I had indeed switched the glyph names while setting up the substitution... now it should be ok:

[mrjovanovic]

Yup, looks perfect.

On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 11:20:59AM -0700, belluzj wrote:

I had indeed switched the glyph names while setting up the substitution... now it should be ok:

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#23 (comment)

[belluzj]

Hello Cyrillic users!

I just released Fantasque Sans Mono 1.7.0 with Cyrillic characters in all of the four variants of the font (regular, italic, bold, bold italic). I consider this is the beta version of Cyrillic support, and I will keep this issue open to track new problems with the released glyphs. Also I still haven't addressed the line height issue with accented capital letters. So, feel free to download the new version and try it out!

[sergeevabc]

абвгдеёжзийклмнопрстуфхцчшщъыьэюя
                    ^

Lowercase “у” looks unnatural to me. More opinions from Russian speakers would be appreciated.

[belluzj]

Is it the curl at the end of the tail?

[tanmatra]

I do agree, looks a little unnatural. Such tail is good for italic, but not for normal font.

[belluzj]

ok, ok :)

[dayfuaim]

Another one.
The NUMBER SIGN in Cyrillic ("№") looks some ugly and wide (2 places instead of one). :)

Could you correct this?

[belluzj]

Latest release with all the improvements (№, у, line height):

https://github.com/belluzj/fantasque-sans/releases/tag/v1.7.2-alpha.3

[efermi]

I'm not sure about the current revision of у. There are very few fonts where Latin and Cyrillic versions of the letter differ, and even in those usually the Cyrillic one has curlier descender (e.g. Minion Pro, the Lucida family). While I do agree that the Cyrillic version stands out a little, but so does the Latin one, it's just the Cyrillic subset doesn't have other letters with long descenders so it naturally stands out.

[likern]

@belluzj Hello!

Font variant with a larger line height, especially for users of accented capitals

Does a LargeLineHeight affect latin alphabet too?
I'm a Russian developer and want to use this font mostly for programming (so english letters), but as
font will be installed globally in OS, it might be used in Russian text documents (like Word files).

Which font variant do I need to install?