Cyrillic fonts

["Andrey F. Slepuhin" <pooh@shade.msu.ru>]

Dear collegues,
in connection with the work on the project `Representation of scientific
information on computer nets of Russia on the base of the system TeX'
(`Russian TeX project') supported by Russian Foundation of Basic Research
(grand 96-7-89406, see also abstracts of talks submitted to TUG96),
there arises the problem of standardization of the existing cyrillic
extensions of TeX, in particular, fonts. Unfortunately, the problem
is complicated by existence in Russia at least five different basic encodings
for four platforms (ISO 8859-5 and KOI-8 for UNIX, CP866 for MS DOS,
CP1251 for MS Windows and an encoding for Macintosh). Therefore, in order
to make cyrillic fontnames compatible with Fontname 2.0 scheme we suggest
the following:

1) to fix the letter `z' in the `Variant' field in order to denote cyrillic
fonts;

2) to use the next symbol (after `z') to denote the specific encoding
according to the following table:
b - "basic" encoding (cyrillic part of ISO 8859-5, 7-bit font);
i - ISO 8859-5 encoding;
k - KOI-8 encoding;
d - CP866 encoding;
w - CP1251 encoding;
m - Macintosh encoding;
0-4 - encoding extensions (on the base of 7t - TeX text encoding,
may be not supported in future)
5-9 - encoding extensions (on the base of lower part of 8t - Cork encoding)

3) Using this scheme, if we have a font with the point size specified
only one symbol is remained to specify the weight, width and variant of the
font (to fit 8-characters restriction). Fortunately, most of the existing
cyrillic fonts (all that are known to us), have only a few variations of
these parameters. We  suggest the following notation for the weight and the
shape of such fonts. (Comments and suggestions are wellcome and will be
considered.)  
b - bold
Ó - condensed
d - condensed italic
e - extended
f - extended italic
i - italic
n - normal (roman)
s - slanted
t - bold italic
u - unslanted
x - bold extended
y - bold extended italic
The designations for extensions of Computer Modern fonts is a special case and
will be considered separately.

4) We suggest to include ParaGraph International (http://www.paragraph.com), 
the main manufacturer and distributor of professional cyrillic typefaces (in
particular, the manufacturer of the cyrillic part of ITC fonts),
in the list of font suppliers. This company works on a full font family for
TeX. We suggest to reserve the letter `t' for fonts developed by ParaGraph
(ParaType font library, not under ITC licence).

5) A detailed description of the encodings listed in 2 will be given later.

Please, send your comments and suggestions to the address:
rtex@shade.msu.ru

     Sincerely Yours

Coordinator
of the Russian TeX Project,
Executive Director of Foundation "Mathematics"       Yuri E. Hohlov
 
President of CyrTUG, Principal Investigator
of the Russian TeX Project                           Evgenii. V.Pankrtat'ev

Principal Investigator
of the Russian TeX Project                           Stanislav V.Klimenko

Principal Investigator
of the Russian TeX Project                           Sergei V.Znamenskii

A group of developers