August 15, 2009 at 20:57We get free fonts for the Russian language to survive the Second typographic revolution on the Web
For a moment, turn your thoughts back to the past, to the millennium that has ended. Pay tribute to the morning dawn of the World Wide Web, because this dawn is ready to finally die out, giving way to a much brighter glow of the new day.
The first typographic revolution took place on the World Wide Web so long ago that you have to search to find out the details. What Ian Graham writes seems to be true : in Netscape Navigator 2.0, an element first appeared (then it allowed to set only font sizes, and only in arbitrary units), and in Internet Explorer 3 this element had a face attribute that allowed you to set the font style, set the font family. Wikipedia suggests that Netscape Navigator 2.0 appeared in March 1996, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 - in August of the same year. HTML version 3.2 did not even include the face attribute , although it was mentioned that such an attribute exists.
Thirteen years ago.
All these thirteen years, we used mostly proprietary fonts, which are part of operating systems and office suites, to draw the text of websites. Sites had to wonder about which fonts were installed by the reader and which were not installed, and what is the likelihood of one or the other, which fonts can be considered safe . Special jQuery plugins were composed and special pages were created that could figure out the font set on the reader's computer. The particular spirit of that time was perfectly conveyed by despoth, writing an excellent series of articles on such a typography, which is based on the selection of proprietary fonts( Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV - Part V ).
Finally, this time is over: there are signs of the Second Typographic Revolution associated with the arrival of@ font-face .
John Daggett wrote an informative article about how we all will soon (after the advent of Safari 3.1, Firefox 3.5, Opera 10) be able to use downloadable fonts in all popular browsers, and not just in one of the most popular.
Mark Pilgrim roughly outlinedproprietary font licensing situation. This situation is a lot like a dead end. Even the creators of the excellent demonstration of the capabilities of Firefox 3.5 in order to make a page had to specifically contact font manufacturers and make such special (truncated) versions of the fonts used so that it would not make sense to copy them unlicensedly. And over thereThey offer to distribute special web-bitten, bitten, shrunken copies of purchased fonts (which the buyer himself has no right to post, but only refer). Witty. It opens a broad road towards Big Brother: like how recently Kindle readers deleted Orwell’s books for unlicensing (even honestly bought ones - just leaving their cost on the buyer's account). So it is here. An external font can die unexpectedly, even bought in advance.
All this means that, simultaneously with the transition to the use of downloadable fonts, there will most likely be a transition to free (and ideally even free ) fonts on the Web.
This transition will be given to the English-speaking people quite simply: it’s enough to turn to font squirrel to get literally hundreds of fonts, each of which can be used in its work, on its website, without licensing problems. Those who use the Russian language (or, moreover, other languages based on the extended Cyrillic alphabet) will have much, much worse. There are very few free Cyrillic fonts, and the Russian analogue of the squirrel font does not seem to exist at all in nature.
Therefore, I’m going to list here all the free fonts suitable for use on sites writtenin Russian. Feel free to supplement my list.
Liberation Fonts have long been released by Ascender under a contract with Red Hat. Thepress release from the year before last stated that the first release of Liberation fonts did not contain hinting, but a second was expected by the end of the code. It’s probably all right now.
At openfontlibrary.org/media/tags/cyrillic, you can find a little more than a dozen Cyrillic fonts, moreover, completely free (Open Font License) or even transferred to the public domain. Some are quite spectacular: gputeks , say. Fans of the grand-ducal or Church Slavonic written language will surely appreciate the font Cover and the mod of its Slavitsa .
Beautiful font from the authors of the Open Font License. This font so far contains, however, only two styles - regular and italic. (Bold is being developed.)
At the beginning of this year on Habrahabr this font was published , equipped with unprecedented squiggles instead of serifs. The blog of one of the authors has many other, although slightly less interesting and free, fonts.
Technically wonderful site that allows anyone to draw their own fontsin the Flash editor , composing them (like mosaics) from ready-made square pieces containing triangles, arcs, roundings, and so on. The resulting font can be used as a pixel font (in the size in which one dot equals one square of the mosaic from which the font is composed). In other sizes, the font is somewhat lacking in hinting (that is, binding the font lines to the pixel grid), but it also looks tolerable.
I will specially list some interesting fonts that I found there.
Kenaz Cyr is a run -like font with Latin and Russian letters. (The font is non-commercial and not free, but free.)
Offer- Gothic, with Russian letters, free for non-commercial use.
Morgenstern Cyr - pixel Gothic font with Latin and Cyrillic letters.
Old Gamer Cyr - pixel outline font with Latin and Cyrillic letters.
BUD Pixel - bold low-pixel (capital letters 5 pixels high!) Font with Latin letters (including European extensions), Cyrillic alphabet, numbers, punctuation.
Nuclear Depot Radium - pixel font, according to its author, based on the font of the recipe for plutonium from DeLorean. (“Back to the Future.”) Contains extended Latin, extended Cyrillic (but only 20th century letters), Greek and Hebrew letters. (Capital letters are again 5 pixels high.)
Sencilla- a font with pointed strokes, without contrast of strokes, with incomplete strokes, and it has a large mass of Unicode characters (including the whole Cyrillic alphabet with extensions, Latin alphabet with extensions, numbers, Arabic and Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Thai letters and letter of devangari).
8080 - Russian-English pseudo-pixel font with vertical white stripes.
Free (but not free) fonts, more than two and a half hundred of them . Cyrillic is not enough, but there is.
A collection of completely free fonts (which you can not only use, but also modify).
Here are links not only to the aforementioned Gentium, but also to other well-known projects for creating free fonts that I have not mentioned before: Linux Libertine , Freefont , Titus Cyberbit (formerly Bitstream Cyberbit; suitable only for non-commercial use), Vera and its DejaVu mod .
Most of the so-called “ Russian fonts ” on dafont simply distort the Cyrillic characters, trying to make them look like Latin ones (that is, they are suitable for writing English text, for example). The Molot font , however, contains the original Cyrillic alphabet at the right places in the Unicode table.
An extensive selection of fonts that are licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL). I learned about them from a discussion on LOR . The fonts have yat, fita, izhitsa, as well as Russian letters from the time of the pre-imperial and grand-ducal.
The author of this font deliberately, meticulously imitated the style of Russian letters typical of publications from the time of the Empire. Unfortunately, there are only three styles (direct, italics and bold) - that is, there is no bold italics.
On this, I stop listing fonts, and in the comments I suggest you continue from where I left off.
The final element will be good news. We all know that Internet Explorer was the first in the field of downloadable fonts, but its desire to support only the EOT format (not TTF and not OTF) makes it difficult for normal human use of fonts downloaded from the Web (and this is necessary to cover the entire audience: the percentage of IE users significant). Be aware that the aforementioned John Daggett posted a Python script that takes the TrueType font and provides it with anEOT header with an empty “root” line, so that the resulting EOT font can be used on any Web site.
Rejoice!
The first typographic revolution took place on the World Wide Web so long ago that you have to search to find out the details. What Ian Graham writes seems to be true : in Netscape Navigator 2.0, an element first appeared (then it allowed to set only font sizes, and only in arbitrary units), and in Internet Explorer 3 this element had a face attribute that allowed you to set the font style, set the font family. Wikipedia suggests that Netscape Navigator 2.0 appeared in March 1996, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 - in August of the same year. HTML version 3.2 did not even include the face attribute , although it was mentioned that such an attribute exists.
Thirteen years ago.
All these thirteen years, we used mostly proprietary fonts, which are part of operating systems and office suites, to draw the text of websites. Sites had to wonder about which fonts were installed by the reader and which were not installed, and what is the likelihood of one or the other, which fonts can be considered safe . Special jQuery plugins were composed and special pages were created that could figure out the font set on the reader's computer. The particular spirit of that time was perfectly conveyed by despoth, writing an excellent series of articles on such a typography, which is based on the selection of proprietary fonts
Finally, this time is over: there are signs of the Second Typographic Revolution associated with the arrival of
John Daggett wrote an informative article about how we all will soon (after the advent of Safari 3.1, Firefox 3.5, Opera 10) be able to use downloadable fonts in all popular browsers, and not just in one of the most popular.
Mark Pilgrim roughly outlinedproprietary font licensing situation. This situation is a lot like a dead end. Even the creators of the excellent demonstration of the capabilities of Firefox 3.5 in order to make a page had to specifically contact font manufacturers and make such special (truncated) versions of the fonts used so that it would not make sense to copy them unlicensedly. And over thereThey offer to distribute special web-bitten, bitten, shrunken copies of purchased fonts (which the buyer himself has no right to post, but only refer). Witty. It opens a broad road towards Big Brother: like how recently Kindle readers deleted Orwell’s books for unlicensing (even honestly bought ones - just leaving their cost on the buyer's account). So it is here. An external font can die unexpectedly, even bought in advance.
All this means that, simultaneously with the transition to the use of downloadable fonts, there will most likely be a transition to free (and ideally even free ) fonts on the Web.
This transition will be given to the English-speaking people quite simply: it’s enough to turn to font squirrel to get literally hundreds of fonts, each of which can be used in its work, on its website, without licensing problems. Those who use the Russian language (or, moreover, other languages based on the extended Cyrillic alphabet) will have much, much worse. There are very few free Cyrillic fonts, and the Russian analogue of the squirrel font does not seem to exist at all in nature.
Therefore, I’m going to list here all the free fonts suitable for use on sites written
Liberation
Liberation Fonts have long been released by Ascender under a contract with Red Hat. The
Open font library
At openfontlibrary.org/media/tags/cyrillic, you can find a little more than a dozen Cyrillic fonts, moreover, completely free (Open Font License) or even transferred to the public domain. Some are quite spectacular: gputeks , say. Fans of the grand-ducal or Church Slavonic written language will surely appreciate the font Cover and the mod of its Slavitsa .
Gentium
Beautiful font from the authors of the Open Font License. This font so far contains, however, only two styles - regular and italic. (Bold is being developed.)
Philosopher
At the beginning of this year on Habrahabr this font was published , equipped with unprecedented squiggles instead of serifs. The blog of one of the authors has many other, although slightly less interesting and free, fonts.
Fontstruct
Technically wonderful site that allows anyone to draw their own fonts
I will specially list some interesting fonts that I found there.
Kenaz Cyr is a run -like font with Latin and Russian letters. (The font is non-commercial and not free, but free.)
Offer- Gothic, with Russian letters, free for non-commercial use.
Morgenstern Cyr - pixel Gothic font with Latin and Cyrillic letters.
Old Gamer Cyr - pixel outline font with Latin and Cyrillic letters.
BUD Pixel - bold low-pixel (capital letters 5 pixels high!) Font with Latin letters (including European extensions), Cyrillic alphabet, numbers, punctuation.
Nuclear Depot Radium - pixel font, according to its author, based on the font of the recipe for plutonium from DeLorean. (“Back to the Future.”) Contains extended Latin, extended Cyrillic (but only 20th century letters), Greek and Hebrew letters. (Capital letters are again 5 pixels high.)
Sencilla- a font with pointed strokes, without contrast of strokes, with incomplete strokes, and it has a large mass of Unicode characters (including the whole Cyrillic alphabet with extensions, Latin alphabet with extensions, numbers, Arabic and Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Thai letters and letter of devangari).
8080 - Russian-English pseudo-pixel font with vertical white stripes.
Larabie
Free (but not free) fonts, more than two and a half hundred of them . Cyrillic is not enough, but there is.
Free font manifesto
A collection of completely free fonts (which you can not only use, but also modify).
Here are links not only to the aforementioned Gentium, but also to other well-known projects for creating free fonts that I have not mentioned before: Linux Libertine , Freefont , Titus Cyberbit (formerly Bitstream Cyberbit; suitable only for non-commercial use), Vera and its DejaVu mod .
Molot
Most of the so-called “ Russian fonts ” on dafont simply distort the Cyrillic characters, trying to make them look like Latin ones (that is, they are suitable for writing English text, for example). The Molot font , however, contains the original Cyrillic alphabet at the right places in the Unicode table.
Computer Modern Unicode
An extensive selection of fonts that are licensed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL). I learned about them from a discussion on LOR . The fonts have yat, fita, izhitsa, as well as Russian letters from the time of the pre-imperial and grand-ducal.
Old Standard (Headset Ordinary Old)
The author of this font deliberately, meticulously imitated the style of Russian letters typical of publications from the time of the Empire. Unfortunately, there are only three styles (direct, italics and bold) - that is, there is no bold italics.
ALL!..
On this, I stop listing fonts, and in the comments I suggest you continue from where I left off.
The final element will be good news. We all know that Internet Explorer was the first in the field of downloadable fonts, but its desire to support only the EOT format (not TTF and not OTF) makes it difficult for normal human use of fonts downloaded from the Web (and this is necessary to cover the entire audience: the percentage of IE users significant). Be aware that the aforementioned John Daggett posted a Python script that takes the TrueType font and provides it with an
Rejoice!