Apple Central European and Cyrillic fonts

[George Fowler]

Greetings all!

James Kirchner writes:

>I still say the best source of Czechoslovak, Polish and Cyrillic TrueType
>fonts for Macs is ftp.apple.com.

I have extracted all these fonts, and made up new keyboard resources for
these Apple standard fonts, and would be happy to distribute them via email
to anyone who wants them.

In the Central European system, Apple makes available three TrueType font
families, equivalent to Times, Helvetica, and Courier, complete with
italics and bold (well, italic Helvetica CE is just an oblique, but that's
just like the English fonts). Aside from these, they are also bitmap
versions of seven system fonts: Monaco, Geneva, Chicago, etc.; but these
are of little use, since they cannot be printed decently on a laser
printer. (No doubt if you bought the international system 7.5, you'd get
TrueType versions of these as well.) The fonts include the full set of
characters + diacritics needed for Polish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, and
Hungarian; unfortunately, there's no "dj" character (barred d) for
Croatian. I've gone through the process of fetching these from
ftp.apple.com, isolating and identifying the important fonts, and creating
my own keyboard resources for use with them. My keyboards map the major
"additional" characters for each language to the most natural positions on
the Option keyboard. For example, for Czech, lower case c^ = Option-c
(c-hacek), while upper-case C^ = Shift-Option-C; while long vowels are
Option-vowel combinations. The characters e^ and u* (u with kruzhek, or
whatever it's called) are displaced to adjacent characters, since the most
natural keys are already occupied. For Polish, different characters are
promoted to the natural positions, e.g., dotted-z, barred-l, and so forth.
All these Slavic characters are available on each keyboard; the difference
is merely how natural the key combinations are. Since it's a pain in the
neck to figure all of this out to ftp the fonts and figure all this out,
I'll share my post-hassle versions of these fonts with anyone who wants
them.

If you want to receive these fonts, I will send: 1) the three TrueType
fonts; 2) whatever language keyboard(s) you request; 3) explicit
installation instructions for system 7.1 or higher (the keyboards are
inefficient in system 7.0 or 7.0.1, although usable; they do not work at
all in system 6.0.x); 4) a reference document giving charts for typing all
the included characters; 5) a small public-domain utility for activating
the keyboard menu for easy shifts between keyboards (works only on System
7.1 and higher). Optionally, I will provide or point you to the shareware
control panel PopChar 2.7.1, which provides a pop-up window for identifying
and/or inserting little-used characters, as well as the shareware macro
utility KeyQuencer, which works about like QuicKeys (only simpler), and can
be used to switch between keyboards without using the mouse.

I have done about the same for the Apple Cyrillic fonts, except that I have
only one keyboard, based on the AATSEEL student (transliteration-style)
keyboard. In Cyrillic Apple provides the same three basic TrueType fonts,
with Latin characters in lower ascii and Cyrillic characters in upper
ascii. The keyboard resource "promotes" the Cyrillic letters so that they
may be typed from the regular keyboard. I have not made up a "Caps Lock"
keyboard, whereby Cyrillic would be triggered by hitting the Caps Lock key
(thus making it unnecessary to change keyboards via the keyboard menu),
because I use QuicKeys, which allows me to change keyboards with a single
keystroke. But I could also do this if someone needs it.

One important caveat: Jake Jakobson of Pittsburgh warned me sometime back
that the Apple CE fonts don't print properly to a high-resolution, 1200-dpi
imagesetter. He has great expertise in Mac fonts (he taught me most of what
I know about keyboard editing!), and we should beware of this problem. On
the other hand, I have printed the CE fonts to a variety of printers,
including two different 600-dpi printers, with no special problems. I think
for most purposes these fonts are good enough. 'Course, Times is a really
homely font; I'd much rather have a Palatino CE, New Century Schoolbook CE,
and Avant Garde CE. Perhaps they are supplied with the full, commercial
international systems, and I might be able to, ahem, "borrow" them someday!

George Fowler

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George Fowler                       GFowler at Indiana.Edu [Email]
Dept. of Slavic Languages         **1-317-726-1482 [home] ** [Try here first!]
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