Small case is not just tinier capitals; italics are not merely slanted letters

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/08/27 03:16 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/08/27/4587546.aspx


The other day Lynn asked:

Michael,

I'm not sure which group you are working in, but I am hoping you can forward this message to someone who might be able to look at this.

We got a message from a customer about the EU Expansion Font Update v.1.02 for XP. He loaded it on his machine and created the attached table to test out the additional characters. In the bottom table, the Italic and Bold columns are printing a U with grave accent instead of a Bulgarian ѝ (Cyrillic Capital letter I with grave, U+045D) for Arial, Times and Trebuchet. Verdana is correct. If I select the symbol for the Cyrillic I with grave out of the symbol table for any of these three fonts, the little pop-up window shows a U with grave accent and if I insert it into the document, a U with grave accent is displayed. This happens for both the upper and lower case characters (U+040D, U+045D).

I am hoping there might be a fix for this, or that one is forthcoming.

Thanks for any help.

I forwarded it on to Judy and Simon since they know lots more about fonts than I.

Judy verified that this was an expected difference, kind of the Bulgarian version of the Serbian difference in italic forms I talked about in this post.

Here is an example where you can see this other form:

Of course Tahoma's italic support is calculated by a bit of GDI slanting, so its results are just an algorithmic thing -- the form that looks more "u-ish" is the appropriate one for italic lowercase U+045d.

And then Simon pointed out some Latin-based examples of the issue, which are much easier for people who do not know the Cyrillic script to fathom )I took it as a screenshot in case you don't have all the fonts in question):

Bravo for the small differences -- kind of argues for a Tahoma Italic to get done here, doesn't it? :-)

 

This post brought to you by ѝ (U+045d, a.k.a. CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER I WITH GRAVE)


# John Hudson on 27 Aug 2007 7:48 PM:

The u-shape in this case isn't really equivalent to the Serbian italic variants, which differ from the international norms for certain letters. This u-shape is the normal cursive shape for the Cyrillic letter и. If your correspondent looked more closely at the Times and Arial italic fonts, she would see that this shape is also used for U+0438 and U+0439.

[Among other interesting things happens in cursive Cyrillic, this u-shape is also employed as the basis for U+0446 and U+045F. In other words, letters that do not visually relate to each other in the upright style, do relate to each other in the cursive style.]

By the way, U+045D is used for Macedonian as well as Bulgarian.

# Cristian Secară on 29 Aug 2007 8:57 AM:

Why then the glyph for 045D is still a pure ѝ for Courier New italic and Verdana italic ? (Courier New on Vista, Verdana both in EU font update and Vista)

Cristi

# Michael S. Kaplan on 29 Aug 2007 9:58 AM:

Hi Cristi....

Because not everyone does everything right 100% of the time? :-)


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