Missing bars on palatalized Komi letters

[dscorbett]

The palatalized Komi letters U+0502..U+0505 and U+0508..U+050F should have horizontal bars upon their upwards curls. Currently in Fairfax HD, U+050C..U+050D have only the left half of the bar, and the rest have no bar at all. The bar is not a mere serif: it does appear in sans-serif fonts. There are plenty of examples in the “на молодцовском алфавите 1920-тых годов” section of this Komi book list. In all the sans-serif text in those books, I have only found two counterexamples, both on the title page of Шонді југӧр (1926) in “ЛЫԂԂӦГПАНЫԌ”, though the rest of the sans-serif text within that book follows the general pattern. Here is another Komi book list.

[dscorbett]

Do you have any evidence beyond these three system/pan-Unicode computer fonts that were not designed for Komi? Did the people who made those sans-serif fonts know anything about the Molodtsov alphabet, or were they guessing based on other poorly researched sans-serif fonts and/or the Unicode code chart’s serifed glyphs?

[dscorbett]

You are right. I should have provided more digestible evidence. I can dig through the book list again and pick out specific examples. How much would be enough? Examples of the sort of evidence I would provide are the word “Шноԉԋин” in the first heading of page 4 of Шонԁі Југӧр (1921), the word “Повԅісны” in the heading on page 3 of Роч вылыԍ лӧԍӧԁӧм: Мојԁанкывјас (1923), and various words in bold on page 121 of К грамматической конструкции слов Зырянского языка (1928), as well as cases where even in serif fonts the bar often looks noticeably different from a normal serif. An example of a counterexample I would discuss is the word “СБОРԊІК” on the title page of Фоԉклорнӧј сборԋік (1938).

Are you a maintainer of this font? I wouldn’t want to spend many hours on something no maintainer will ever actually look at.

I have fixed the first link to point to an archive of the book list.

I have not been able to find much discussion of these glyphs. I did find a Russian article that mentions “специфическими буквами с правосторонними загибами” (“specific letters with right-hand bends”) but without any details about them or whether any bars are mandatory.

In the absence of any explicit discussion of the correct glyphs, I think that examples of the letters in use should be sufficient. The books in those two lists that use sans-serif fonts overwhelmingly include horizontal bars. Maybe if this alphabet had been used for more than a decade the bar would eventually have been discarded, but maybe not; it doesn’t seem to have actually happened, and I think fonts should follow the attested forms. Does this seem reasonable to you?

[RebeccaRGB]

I don't think there's enough evidence (just one font) that the bars are mandatory. That Arial, Calibri, and DejaVu Sans all leave them off is enough to convince me that leaving them off is fine. Especially as this is a monospaced font with limited space.