Intro to version 2
I have been interested in Cyrillic typography for several years, so I
was pretty excited when I downloaded Tony Janick's adaptation of Cyrillic
to Adobe's version of ITC Italia. What we know of today as Cyrillic is
descended from Old Slavonic. The face is credited to St. Cyril who is
also responsible for introducing that part of the world to Christianity.
We now know that Cyril was more likely responsible for Golgothic, but
what the heck. It is also worth noting that the Eastern Orthodox Church
managed to keep printing presses out of Russia for almost 100 years.
(They may have understood all-too-well the connection between the rapid
spread of Lutheranism and Luther's German bible, printed using that
newfangled movable type.)  The characters of Cyrillic include Greek,
Latin, and Hebrew roots. Cyrillic as we know it today is the result of
the Westernophilic notions of Peter the Great, the Russian Tsar who
created St. Petersberg on a swamp which happened to be the westernmost
point of his empire. Among his deeds (which included a tax on beards),
Peter imported some type mongers from Holland who were ordered to
simplify the alphabet. Their attempts to understand the alphabet are
largely responsible for oddities such as the "backwards R" and other
characters that appear to be contortions of letters in our familiar Latin
alphabet. They =are= contortions of some letters in our familiar Latin
alphabet! Cyrillic was further simplified by Lenin in 1917. Stalin then
complicated it slightly further when he adapted the alphabet (and added
some special characters) to be used by all Russian republics--including
those which used other alphabets (such as Latin or Arabic). In addition
these transliterative uses, the Cyrillic alphabet is used by several other
languages. These languages are Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Serbian,
Macedonian, and Bulgarian. Each of these adds a few special characters to
the basic, 33-character alphabet. Observers of Cyrillic and Old Slavonic
typography will note that several of the styles are "ultra-condensed."
This is, in part, a reaction to the fact that Cyrillic does not have a
lower case as we know it in Latin-based languages. Our lower case came
from a merger of two different writing forms. In the case of Cyrillic,
such a merger was never attempted, and the lower case is basically
something known as "minuscule" (with the upper case known as "majuscule").
These words are Latin for the obvious: Cyrillic lower case consists
primarily of small versions of the capital letters, not a different,
narrower alphabet as is the case with the Latin-based languages. This makes
printed Cyrillic look a lot like type that is printed in Caps/Small Caps
in English.  Those who are especially fascinated by this subject (and it's
not hard to be), and have internet access, may wish to subscribe to the
RUSTEX listserv. Although nominally set up to support use of the TeX
language with Russian, it is a vast and wonderful repository (and
e-mail discussion group) of all things to do with Russian and computers.
To subscribe, send e-mail to Dmitri Vulis: dlv@cunyvms1.bitnet.ari

The original version of this font didn't work with my printer. I imported
the font into Fontographer 3.2, saved it, and it worked just fine.
While I was at it, I decided to put some of my lack of knowledge to work
and fixed a few discrepancies on the shapes of some of the characters
in the font. Since neither of us are (or at least, I am not) terribly
facile (yet) with curve manipulation or Fontographer, this is still
far from a perfect font. In particular, I am unhappy with the overall
color of the type on the printed page. I think I just haven't succeeded
in keeping the widths of the character strokes appropriately adjusted.
On the other hand, maybe it's not so bad, either. Hopefully, other
people will follow Tony's example and either fix this one further, or
put more such fonts in the public domain. To avoid confusion, I have
renamed the font "ItaliaCyrillic". If you have the font "Cyrillic",
then you have Tony's original version, as well. Please let me know if
there are any technical problems with this font.  I haven't had time to
check how this character set corresponds with that of the commercial
Cassady & Greene fonts, nor have I looked at the new vector encodings
that will be supported by Apple's Russian Information System (or, for
that matter, at the encodings for the forthcoming Adobe Minion Cyrillic).
In other words, documents composed using this font will probably read
wrong if you decide to use a commercial Russian font later, or if you
switch to Apple's Russian version of the Mac operating system. If I ever
find the time to go through the various standards, or if it is ever
clear which standards will be useful to the casual Mac users, I have
every intention of going back and re-encoding this. For now, what you
have is what Tony put together and documented.  The sole intent of this
font is to provide a way for people interested in Russian to work on
their computers in Russian without having to purchase additional
software and/or fonts. Given that none of the alternatives I mentioned
above are widely available and are inconsistent with each other, I am
in total agreement with Tony that this is a neat project and am looking
forward to seeing future incarnations of the font.  All restrictions
(and encouragements) stated by Tony below should still be considered
in effect.  Ari Davidow, BMUG, 27 June 1991 ari@well.sf.ca.us

Howdy Comrades!  This is a new Cyrillic type 1 Laser font brought to
you by the Tony Jonick of the Moo Prometheus League (Bringing Fire
to the Cows!) It was created in Fontographer 3.1.  "Cyriltalia"
Basically, I needed a laser face to use for communicating with pen pals
in the good ol  USSR, and couldn t find a free one. So I made one up.
If you want to see the character set, quit and load in Cyriltalia.
We all have some shareware we never get around to paying for. We all
mean to get around to it, but . . . . Well, I figure if you've got a
guilty conscience, one way to alleviate it is to add to the general
library of Macintosh software.  If you are one of those people who has
to pay for things and has the cash, I ask that you make a donation to:

Peace Links
747 8th St., SE
Washington, DC 2003

They are an excellent group which hooked me up with my Soviet pen pals,
and work for peace through personal global inter-communication. They
can get you pen-pals who speak English or Russian (If you've got the
time, learn Russian. It's fun, it s clean, and it doesn't rot your
teeth.)  This face is for free use and distribution, so long as it is
distributed with ALL of the accompanying documents, and remains
unaltered. I have no problem with distribution on disks for sale by
non-profit groups like BMUG (ultra-cool groovies), but I would prefer
that it not be sold by for profit companies unless they donate some
money to Peace Links.

Legal Moo-Crap: I am not responsible for any problems if your computer
blows up, loses data, or turns into a black hole and sinks into the
center of the planet taking your mold collection with it. I make no
guarantee, express or implied, that this font will clean the floor
or get you into the sack with that sexy person you've been ogling.
I simply suggest that if you use this font, have a clean system, and
limit you font menu to under 300 faces at any one time. I am also
not responsible for people who use this font to write nasty letters
to President Bush, calling him a genocidal maniac who doesn't give
a damn about schools, and who sign their letters Ivan the Terrible.
Okay?
