We get free fonts for the Russian language to survive the Second typographical revolution in the Web
For a minute, turn your thoughts back to the past, to the past millennium. Give tribute to the dawn of the World Wide Web, because the dawn is ready to go out completely, giving way to a much brighter glow of the new day.
The first typographical revolution took place on the World Wide Web so long ago that it has to be searched in order to establish the details. What Ian Graham writes seems credible: in Netscape Navigator 2.0, the element <font> first appeared (then it allowed to set only font sizes, and only in conventional units), and in Internet Explorer 3 this element had the face attribute, which allowed to define the style , set font family. Wikipedia suggests that Netscape Navigator 2.0 appeared in March 1996 , and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 in August of the same year. The HTML version 3.2 language did not even include the face attribute , although it was mentioned that such an attribute exists.
Thirteen years ago.
')
For all these thirteen years, non-free fonts, which are part of operating systems and office suites, have mostly been used to mark the text of websites. Sites have come to guess about which fonts are installed in the reader and which ones are not installed, and what is the probability of one or the other, which fonts can be considered safe . Special jQuery plugins were written and special pages were created that can figure out a set of fonts on the reader’s computer. The special spirit of that time perfectly conveyed despoth , having composed an excellent series of articles on such web typography, which is based precisely on the selection of non-free fonts( part I - part II - part III - part IV - part V ).
Finally, this time is over: the signs of the Second Typographical Revolution connected with the advent of @ font-face are clearly visible.
John Daggett wrote an informative article about how we all very soon (after the advent of Safari 3.1, Firefox 3.5, Opera 10) will be able to use downloadable fonts in all popular browsers, and not just in one of the most popular.
Mark Pilgrim roughly described the situation with the licensing of proprietary fonts. This situation is a lot like a deaf dead end. Even the creators of the excellent demonstration of the capabilities of Firefox 3.5 , in order to make a page, had to specifically contact the font manufacturers and make such special (truncated) versions of the fonts used, so that there was no point in copying them unlicensed. And over there, they propose to distribute special spider web-bitten snatched copies of purchased fonts (which the buyer himself has no right to post, but only to refer to). Witty. Opens a wide road in the direction of Big Brother: such as how recently Kindle readers have deleted Orwell’s books for unlicensed use (even honestly bought ones, just leaving them in the buyer's account as payment). So here. An external font may suddenly die, even if purchased in advance.
All this means that simultaneously with the transition to the use of downloadable fonts, the most likely transition to free (and ideally even free ) fonts on the Web will take place.
This transition will be given to the English-speaking people quite simply: it is enough to turn to the squirrel font to get literally hundreds of fonts, each of which can be used without licensing problems in its work on its website. Those who use Russian (or, moreover, other languages ​​based on advanced Cyrillic) will have much, much worse. There are very few free Cyrillic fonts, and the Russian equivalent of font-protein seems to not exist at all in nature.
I am therefore going to list right here all the free fonts that are suitable for use on sites writtenin Russian. Feel free to supplement my list.
Liberation Fonts fonts have long been released by Ascender Corporation under a contract with Red Hat. That last year’spress release states that the first release of the Liberation fonts did not contain a hinting, but by the end of the code the second was expected. Probably now everything is in order.
At openfontlibrary.org/media/tags/cyrillic, you can find a little more than a dozen Cyrillic fonts, moreover completely free (Open Font License) or even transferred to the public domain. Some are pretty spectacular: gputeks , say. Fans of the grand-ducal or ecclesiastical Slavonic written speech will certainly appreciate the font Coverage and mod of its Slavitsa .
Beautiful font from the authors of the license Open Font License. This font so far contains, however, only two styles - regular and italic. (Bold being developed.)
Earlier this year, this font was published on Habrahabr, equipped with unprecedented fillings instead of serifs. In the blog of one of the authors there are many other, albeit slightly less interesting and free fonts.
A technically wonderful site that allows anyone to draw their own fontsin the Flash editor , composing them (like a mosaic) from ready-made square pieces containing triangles, arcs, rounding, and so on. The resulting font can be used as a pixel (in the size in which one point equals one square of the mosaic of which the font is composed). In other sizes, the font lacks some hinting (that is, the binding of the font lines to the pixel grid), but it also looks bearable.
I will enumerate specially some interesting fonts that I discovered there.
Kenaz Cyr - runic-like font with Latin and Russian letters. (The font is non-commercial and not free, but free.)
Offer - Gothic, with Russian letters, free for non-commercial use.
Morgenstern Cyr - pixel gothic font with Latin and Cyrillic.
Old Gamer Cyr - pixel contour font with Latin and Cyrillic.
BUD Pixel is a bold low-pixel (capital letters 5 pixels in height!) Font with Latin (including European extensions), Cyrillic, numerals, punctuation.
Nuclear Depot Radium is a pixel font, according to its author, based on the font for the plutonium recipe from DeLorean. (“Back to the Future.”) Contains expanded Latin, expanded Cyrillic (but letters of the 20th century only), Greek and Hebrew letters. (Capital letters are again 5 pixels tall.)
sencilla is a font with sharpened strokes, without contrast of strokes, with not fully reaching strokes, and there is a large mass of Unicode characters (including all Cyrillic with extensions, Latin with extensions, numerals, Arabic and Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Thai letters and the letter of devangari).
8080 - Russian-English pseudo-pixel font with vertical white stripes.
Free (but not free) fonts, more than two and a half hundreds of them . Cyrillic little, but there is.
A collection of completely free fonts (which unhindered can not only be used, but also modified).
Here you can find links not only to the aforementioned Gentium, but also to other well-known free font projects I haven't mentioned before: Linux Libertine , Freefont , Titus Cyberbit (formerly Bitstream Cyberbit; only suitable for non-commercial use), Vera and his DejaVu mod.
Most of the so-called “ Russian fonts ” on dafont simply pervert the Cyrillic characters, trying to make them similar to Latin characters (that is, suitable for writing English text, for example). The Molot font, however, contains genuine Cyrillic in the right places in the Unicode table.
Extensive selection of fonts distributed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL). I learned about them from the discussion on LOR . In the fonts there is Ie, Phi, Izhitsa, as well as Russian letters from the times of pre-imperial and grand-princely.
The author of this font deliberately, meticulously imitated the inscription of Russian letters, typical of the publications of the Empire. Unfortunately, there are only three outlines (direct, italic and bold) —that is, there are no bold italics.
I’m stopping the listing of the fonts, and I suggest you continue in the comments from the place where I stopped.
In the role of the final element will make good news. We all know that Internet Explorer was the first in the field of downloadable fonts, but its desire to support only the EOT format (not TTF and not OTF) makes it difficult for people to use fonts downloaded from the Web (this is necessary to cover the entire audience: the percentage of IE users significant). Be aware that the aforementioned John Daggett laid out a script on Python that takes the TrueType font and supplies it with anEOT header with an empty “root” string, so that the resulting EOT font can be used on any Web site.
Rejoice the same!
The first typographical revolution took place on the World Wide Web so long ago that it has to be searched in order to establish the details. What Ian Graham writes seems credible: in Netscape Navigator 2.0, the element <font> first appeared (then it allowed to set only font sizes, and only in conventional units), and in Internet Explorer 3 this element had the face attribute, which allowed to define the style , set font family. Wikipedia suggests that Netscape Navigator 2.0 appeared in March 1996 , and Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 in August of the same year. The HTML version 3.2 language did not even include the face attribute , although it was mentioned that such an attribute exists.
Thirteen years ago.
')
For all these thirteen years, non-free fonts, which are part of operating systems and office suites, have mostly been used to mark the text of websites. Sites have come to guess about which fonts are installed in the reader and which ones are not installed, and what is the probability of one or the other, which fonts can be considered safe . Special jQuery plugins were written and special pages were created that can figure out a set of fonts on the reader’s computer. The special spirit of that time perfectly conveyed despoth , having composed an excellent series of articles on such web typography, which is based precisely on the selection of non-free fonts
Finally, this time is over: the signs of the Second Typographical Revolution connected with the advent of @ font-face are clearly visible.
John Daggett wrote an informative article about how we all very soon (after the advent of Safari 3.1, Firefox 3.5, Opera 10) will be able to use downloadable fonts in all popular browsers, and not just in one of the most popular.
Mark Pilgrim roughly described the situation with the licensing of proprietary fonts. This situation is a lot like a deaf dead end. Even the creators of the excellent demonstration of the capabilities of Firefox 3.5 , in order to make a page, had to specifically contact the font manufacturers and make such special (truncated) versions of the fonts used, so that there was no point in copying them unlicensed. And over there, they propose to distribute special spider web-bitten snatched copies of purchased fonts (which the buyer himself has no right to post, but only to refer to). Witty. Opens a wide road in the direction of Big Brother: such as how recently Kindle readers have deleted Orwell’s books for unlicensed use (even honestly bought ones, just leaving them in the buyer's account as payment). So here. An external font may suddenly die, even if purchased in advance.
All this means that simultaneously with the transition to the use of downloadable fonts, the most likely transition to free (and ideally even free ) fonts on the Web will take place.
This transition will be given to the English-speaking people quite simply: it is enough to turn to the squirrel font to get literally hundreds of fonts, each of which can be used without licensing problems in its work on its website. Those who use Russian (or, moreover, other languages ​​based on advanced Cyrillic) will have much, much worse. There are very few free Cyrillic fonts, and the Russian equivalent of font-protein seems to not exist at all in nature.
I am therefore going to list right here all the free fonts that are suitable for use on sites written
Liberation
Liberation Fonts fonts have long been released by Ascender Corporation under a contract with Red Hat. That last year’s
Open Font Library
At openfontlibrary.org/media/tags/cyrillic, you can find a little more than a dozen Cyrillic fonts, moreover completely free (Open Font License) or even transferred to the public domain. Some are pretty spectacular: gputeks , say. Fans of the grand-ducal or ecclesiastical Slavonic written speech will certainly appreciate the font Coverage and mod of its Slavitsa .
Gentium
Beautiful font from the authors of the license Open Font License. This font so far contains, however, only two styles - regular and italic. (Bold being developed.)
Philosopher
Earlier this year, this font was published on Habrahabr, equipped with unprecedented fillings instead of serifs. In the blog of one of the authors there are many other, albeit slightly less interesting and free fonts.
FontStruct
A technically wonderful site that allows anyone to draw their own fonts
I will enumerate specially some interesting fonts that I discovered there.
Kenaz Cyr - runic-like font with Latin and Russian letters. (The font is non-commercial and not free, but free.)
Offer - Gothic, with Russian letters, free for non-commercial use.
Morgenstern Cyr - pixel gothic font with Latin and Cyrillic.
Old Gamer Cyr - pixel contour font with Latin and Cyrillic.
BUD Pixel is a bold low-pixel (capital letters 5 pixels in height!) Font with Latin (including European extensions), Cyrillic, numerals, punctuation.
Nuclear Depot Radium is a pixel font, according to its author, based on the font for the plutonium recipe from DeLorean. (“Back to the Future.”) Contains expanded Latin, expanded Cyrillic (but letters of the 20th century only), Greek and Hebrew letters. (Capital letters are again 5 pixels tall.)
sencilla is a font with sharpened strokes, without contrast of strokes, with not fully reaching strokes, and there is a large mass of Unicode characters (including all Cyrillic with extensions, Latin with extensions, numerals, Arabic and Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Thai letters and the letter of devangari).
8080 - Russian-English pseudo-pixel font with vertical white stripes.
Larabie
Free (but not free) fonts, more than two and a half hundreds of them . Cyrillic little, but there is.
Free font manifesto
A collection of completely free fonts (which unhindered can not only be used, but also modified).
Here you can find links not only to the aforementioned Gentium, but also to other well-known free font projects I haven't mentioned before: Linux Libertine , Freefont , Titus Cyberbit (formerly Bitstream Cyberbit; only suitable for non-commercial use), Vera and his DejaVu mod.
Molot
Most of the so-called “ Russian fonts ” on dafont simply pervert the Cyrillic characters, trying to make them similar to Latin characters (that is, suitable for writing English text, for example). The Molot font, however, contains genuine Cyrillic in the right places in the Unicode table.
Computer modern unicode
Extensive selection of fonts distributed under the SIL Open Font License (OFL). I learned about them from the discussion on LOR . In the fonts there is Ie, Phi, Izhitsa, as well as Russian letters from the times of pre-imperial and grand-princely.
Old Standard (Headset Ordinary Old)
The author of this font deliberately, meticulously imitated the inscription of Russian letters, typical of the publications of the Empire. Unfortunately, there are only three outlines (direct, italic and bold) —that is, there are no bold italics.
EVERYTHING!..
I’m stopping the listing of the fonts, and I suggest you continue in the comments from the place where I stopped.
In the role of the final element will make good news. We all know that Internet Explorer was the first in the field of downloadable fonts, but its desire to support only the EOT format (not TTF and not OTF) makes it difficult for people to use fonts downloaded from the Web (this is necessary to cover the entire audience: the percentage of IE users significant). Be aware that the aforementioned John Daggett laid out a script on Python that takes the TrueType font and supplies it with an
Rejoice the same!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/67164/
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