Apple Central European and Cyrillic fonts

[L. Jake Jacobson]

Regarding recent traffic on SEELangs (with a linguistic footnote at
the end!) concerning EE software:

> My own experience indicates that these two-part Adobe fonts don't look
> laser- quality unless a real laser printer is used.

You can get laser-quality output with PostScript Type 1 fonts on a QuickDraw
printer (such as a StyleWriter) by using Adobe Type Manager (ATM). There
are numerous ways to get ATM, the least expensive for someone with full
Internet access being to download QuickDraw GX 1.1.2 from the system
software area of ftp.info.apple.com or www.info.apple.com and then
performing a custom install (ATM only).

As has been mentioned on this list, Apple supplies (mostly) suitable
resources in TrueType format, which do not require ATM.

On Sat, 27 May 1995, George Fowler wrote:

> 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 April 1994 Developers' CD contains numerous international versions
of System 7.1.  As of that release, the only TrueType families
represented were Times CE, Helvetica CE and Courier CE.  Every other
CE font is bitmap only.

> 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.

Curiously, if one opens Times CE with a font editor, one will find that
the lower-case barred d is present, in position 268.  Since most users
operate with technology that cannot access anything above 256, it might
just as well not be there.

In the Croatian System 7.1 on the Developers' CD, the Croatian system
uses fonts that are simply named Times, Helvetica, etc. (with no
suffix).  They are, however, different than the "US" Times in that
they have the necessary Croatian characters in various trans-ASCII
positions.  But, they seem to be in *different* positions than the
CE fonts!

[generous offer to share files deleted]

> 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.

Both the CE fonts as well as the Apple Cyrillic fonts are maybe a little
less well developed than most of the system fonts we are used to.  A
quick comparison of both screen display and output at 11-point of
Times, Times CE, and Latinskij will demonstrate this.  In printing
Times CE to a 1200-dpi output device using PageMaker or Word, don't be
surprised if the accents fly up away from the letter they're supposed
to rest on and print in the middle of the line above (the font makes
extensive use of composite glyphs).  Under the same printing
environment, the Cyrillic font Latinskij exhibits its own peculiarities,
the most serious being an open bowl at the bottom of the lower-case
Cyrillic "b".

> I think
> for most purposes these fonts are good enough.

Absolutely.  With the exception of Ukrainian (see below).

> 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!

As I mentioned above, from what I've seen of 7.1, you've got all you're
really going to get in the way of TrueType fonts from ftp.apple.com
already.  [Is anyone going to be in Prague or Warsaw this summer?
Perhaps an Apple dealer there could point us to a commercial vendor for
fonts in this encoding.]

The only exception to the useful of these free fonts has to do with the
Apple Cyrillic fonts plucked from Russian 7.0.1 at ftp.apple.com.  Has
anyone noticed that they do not have the "hard g" (Unicode: GE WITH
UPTURN)? Probably because this character was missing from ISO 8859-5.  So
then Apple had to go and make up yet another, slightly different encoding
for its Ukrainian system.

Didn't the comic strip "Dilbert" recently have a sequence of strips about
a computer company that forgot to put the letter "Q" on its keyboards?
Well, we're about at that level in respect to the fonts mentioned above. I
can hear the exchange in the lunch room:

  "Whoops, we forgot to include the barred d's, so I guess we'll have to
  whip up something completely different to deal with the Croatian system.
  Too bad it'll be incompatible with the other resources of the region."

or

  "Whoops, we forgot to include a couple of Cyrillic letters that are
  used in the second largest Cyrillic-using country.  Guess we'll
  have to make another standard that will be slightly different
  than the one used in the largest Cyrillic-using country, which is
  right next door."

Does anyone else get the feeling that what Apple really needed was a
(triumphant fanfare!)... a Slavic linguist?  The next time you're
enjoying a beverage with a local software engineer, point out that
they have a somewhat sketchy record in developing character sets, and
make sure they understand that what they really need to do is hire a
(preferably, Slavic) linguist to help them out in this and all facets of
software development.  Maybe one of us will get a job. <guffaw>

PS.  Some of these problems may be solved by Apple's new QuickDraw
GX technology.  Under QD GX, a font may have 65,000 (!) glyphs
as well as numerous mapping tables to enable a user to access them.
A single font could easily handle all the European languages:  Latin
and Greek and Cyrillic.  The standard QD GX font format contains a *very*
impressive Latin set.

PSS.  If there is anyone out there using my freeware Cyrillic fonts
Constantin and Methodius, I have an upgrade available soon.  The new
versions won't be at ftp.pitt.edu for a while, though, as the
administrator is out of town.  If you're in a hurry, you can check my web
page in a couple of days -- I'll have a link there.

-jake
______________________________________________________________________
L. C. J. Jacobson       lcj+ at pitt.edu        http://www.pitt.edu/~lcj/