Mastering with Cyrillic default

Josh_F

Hello everyone.

In the past I've mastered fonts that contain Cyrillic character sets, but always had Latin as the default script.

I have a client that is asking for the Cyrillic script as the default on a custom font. 

So I have a couple questions for everyone.

1) First, is there any need to master a Cyrillic "default" font any differently than a normal Latin font that contains Cyrillic? If not, than the next 2 questions don't really matter.

2) I usually have everything sorted by Unicode when mastering files, but if Cyrillic is the default script, do I need to sort by one of the Cyrillic-centric encodings instead? For example "ISO 8859 - 5 Cyrillic" or "0400 Cyrillic", or does it not really matter?

3) In the past when I've mastered typefaces that include Cyrillc, these are the language script tags I've included that cover the necessary characters...

languagesystem dflt dflt;

languagesystem latn dflt;

languagesystem latn TRK;

languagesystem latn AZE;

languagesystem latn CRT;

languagesystem latn ROM;

languagesystem cyrl dflt;

languagesystem cyrl SRB;

If Cyrillic is the "default", does this need to really change any?

Thanks for the help!

Thomas Phinney

1) If the output format is OpenType, then there are not many changes. There are some settings that affect particularly old/legacy environments that one can perhaps tweak, mostly.

You don't say what tool(s) you are using. In some cases, the relevant settings might not even be easily accessible to your font editor.

2) If you are building OpenType, the sorting of the font that I think you're talking about is irrelevant. The only order in the output font is the Glyph ID order. You could conceivably control this to stick Cyrillic first in the actual glyph ordering. Some users of very old Creative Suite apps might notice this in their glyph panel. Few other people would notice it under normal use.

3) No changes needed there.

Samuil Simonov

I don't think there should be any specific problems, unless your customer uses very old software. Just in case, you could sort your first 256 glyphs to match CP1251.

Josh_F

(Working in Fontlab 5 by the way).

Thanks everyone! I appreciate the help.