Re: Cyrillic fonts for Lout 3.13

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Tue, Jul 13, 1999 at 09:39:13PM +0800, Victor Sudakov wrote:

> So, in other words, there are no Cyrillic fonts in lout. Sad.

No. There are no afms for Cyrillic fonts distributed with Lout because
there's no "standard" set of Cyrillic fonts easily accessible, like
Adobe's sets of 14 "core" fonts available with their PS software.

> BTW who said they are pirated? They have been available on ftp for
> ages.

They were removed from funet archive.  They were clearly converted
from TTF and that was not a very good conversion, e.g. kerning pairs
were missing.


> > If you don't want to engage in font piracy (which you surely don't)
> > you still have some pretty viable options.
> > 
> > . ParaType has some free fonts on their web site (www.paratype.ru or
> 
> Thanks a lot for the comprehensive info on possible font
> sources. This looks sad, however. Personally, what fonts do you use,
> if I may ask?

I haven't used Lout to set Russian for a while.  I was using those old
fonts and some converted windows TTFs (naughty me) until I've lost
them while moving to a new box.  I'll probably bother about this the
next time I need to print some Russian ;-).

> All those fonts you mention (Literaturnaya etc.), can they be used
> for lout without any modifications?  I use the koi8-r codepage, if
> that is important.

That's not.  Lout will recode the fonts on the fly.  I don't think I
ever used a font whose native /Encoding was koi8-r.  IIRC, some of
them didn't even have their cyrillic glyphs in the native /Encoding.


> > Installing fonts, or rather making fonts known to Lout is easy.  Just
> > look at the comment in fontdefs and write a line for the new font.
> 
> Is this all that is required?

Basicly - yes.


> No uncommenting anything in any config file,

You will want to change initial language to Russian and initial font
to the cyrillic font, but that's can be done in the document itself.
You can clone an existing setup and make these modifications to it, if
you plan to use it actively - but that's not required, strictly
speaking.


> no running 'lout -x'?

Absolutely.


> No messing with map files and encodings?

koi8r.LCM should do.  In fact you can just include an invocation of
fontdef right in your document:

  fontdef MyCyr Plain { MyCyrillicFont mycyr.afm koi8r.LCM Recode }


One problem with koi8r.LCM as shipped with Lout is that it can't be
used with a cyrillic Courier, since it (mis)uses some ascii positions.
I didn't realize it until I needed a cyrillic courier (some N years
ago).  I was going to send an updated LCM to Jeff, but I always
thought that I will do this tomorrow when I test it more thoroughly,
and then the next version would suddenly came out, and then the next
one, and the next one.  And since nobody complained I have finally
forgot about it.

I will probably grab the ParaType cyrillic couriers tweak them to use
the right glyph names for the pseudo-graphic glyphs (line drawing &co)
and make a separate LCM for this.  This will be the exactly the
koi8-r, so that one can use it with screen dumps etc.

SY, Uwe
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