Cyrillic

[drawcard]

Ok, I think I'm ready to push this to PR now! :)

There may be a second round of minor tweaks & adjustments to come, but it's probably ready for rollout so the wider community can test and give feedback.

I haven't generated the TTFs here, but if this needs to be done I can amend the PR.

Please have a look at the .glyphs file and let me know what you think!

[StefanPeev]

@drawcard Please send me your Cyrillic version. I would like to have a look at it. My e-mail: localfonts.eu@gmail.com. Best regards: Stefan Peev

[drawcard]

Hi @StefanPeev thanks for your interest - the latest updates for Cyrillic are published to my branch: https://github.com/drawcard/figtree/tree/cyrillic which you can download a ZIP / clone the repo of to check out the source files.

[drawcard]

@erikdkennedy could you please refresh my memory, is there anything further I need to do for the commit? eg. generate OTFs etc?

[erikdkennedy]

@drawcard You're good! My biggest issue is that if I'm going to incorporate Cyrillic, I would like to get it reviewed by at least one native-reading type designer – which looms like a large enough project in my mind that I've procrastinated on the whole thing. If you know of anyone though, let me know :)

[emmamarichal]

Hello everyone! I'm Emma and I'm working in the GF team as font onboarder. I can show the cyrillic to my colleagues, no problem for that.

My only concern is that I don't see any Cyrillic in the Italic version. To onboard this update, we will need the exact same glyphset in Roman and Italic.

Is it something you planned to do @drawcard? So I think we can close this PR, and if you draw the italic one day, you will open a new one :)

Don't hesitate if you have any questions, Cheers! Emma

[drawcard]

@erikdkennedy did you want to do the italic conversion, or are you OK with me taking it on? If so please send DM / email me your specs for converting to italic & can give it a shot. I'll wait for @emmamarichal's review before proceeding.

Also @emmamarichal we may produce a Greek character set as requested in #13, do you have anyone on your side who can help with reviewing that, when it's ready?

[emmamarichal]

cc @erikdkennedy @drawcard I think you can go ahead since you already done the roman version :)

I can eventually ask if somebody can tell me if it's good or not in term of design, to see if we onboard it or not, but we can't really provide a precise review. Our work concerns the technical and QA part. For the design, it would be better if you find someone who is a Greek reader an specialised on this field 👍

[erikdkennedy]

@drawcard just emailed you, but posting here for posterity:

• Slant angle is 9.5°
• The best way to do it (that I've found) is with the cursify function (as mentioned here), but with caveats:
  • This works way better for straight-edged segments than curved segments. In fact, for the curved forms, I don't even use cursify. Instead, on Jonny Pinhorn's advice, I...
    1. Select a curved glyph (or part of one) like \ocg etc
    2. Rotate right by 4.75°
    3. Slant right by 4.75°
    4. Make further adjustments by hand as needed
  • Cursify is very sensitive to character widths. If your stem widths are close to those listed in the Masters tab of Font Info (e.g. /no), then it will work fantastically. But if not (e.g. /*™️), then you'll get some wonky results, and you'll need to edit by hand
  • A few guidelines:
  • All horizontal parts of letterforms should maintain their thickness
  • Vertical parts should also maintain their thickness, but be slanted 9.5° (easy to see if the stem thickness reporter is enabled)
  • The cardinal sin of automatic slanting is that the NW and SE side of rounds get overly thick, while the NE and SW sides get overly thin. Ideally, all 4 sections are equal. That's where the manual work comes in.
• Italics is a separate file. As far as I can tell, the best way to add glyphs to italics is by copying them from the upright file and pasting them into the italics file. That will keep the component and spacing and anchor and kerning data. Then you can slant, then hand-adjust as needed.
• Beware that if a glyph has a component, and you slant the component, then slant the glyph, the component will be slanted at twice the correct angle! So you kind of have to go through them one at a time and make sure each looks good, sometimes cursifying everything, sometimes selecting only the nodes and anchors, but not sub-components, then cursifying just those, etc.