How to design Serbian Cyrillic PART 2 — True Italics

Igor Petrovic
Igor Petrovic Posts: 369
edited November 2024 in Type Design Technique & Theory
I've just published the "Serbian Cyrillic PART 2" article on my blog. The first one was about upright, and this second one is about true italics:

https://nostalgicdolphin.com/blog-post-3/

Italics proved to be harder to describe, taking a month to assemble this instructional study. The thing is that italics are still not strictly established in every aspect, so I had to research historical sources, the official orthography, other Slavic-Cyrillic, modern studies of Serbian handwriting, and personal opinions of type designers and common people.

In addition to being two blog posts, I am also considering putting these two articles into one downloadable PDF which would cost a few bucks. For those who haven't seen the first part, here is the link for it:

https://nostalgicdolphin.com/blog-post-1/
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Comments

  • Andreas Stötzner
    Andreas Stötzner Posts: 842
    Thank you Igor, very good.
  • Igor Petrovic
    Igor Petrovic Posts: 369
    Thanks Andreas, I appreciate it!
  • Tural Alisoy
    Tural Alisoy Posts: 85
    Thanks, Igor. It was been a very useful resource. By the way, so to speak, Serbian б is like a Greek delta? 
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,823
    so to speak, Serbian б is like a Greek delta? 
    In writing, the ductus is similar

    but in Cyrillic the top is always quite horizontal, while in Greek it may also angle downwards
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,260
    It's interesting that some of the Serbian Cyrillic italic forms are used in Russian handwriting, even if not in Russian italics. And, yes, this means that they may be found in the italics of some Russian typefaces too.
  • Tural Alisoy
    Tural Alisoy Posts: 85
    @John Hudson
    I saw that, so I compared it to a delta.
  • Dsche
    Dsche Posts: 28
    I am very grateful for this series of articles; I hope the knowledge gained has helped me make my typefaces slightly better suited for Serbian Cyrillic.
    There is one question that keeps bothering me: are there established approaches to constructing the letter *љ* when the letter *л* has the historical, triangular form derived from the Greek lambda?
    Let me illustrate with an example: here is the letter from the Lazursky typeface (the Serbian characters were likely added by Vladimir Yefimov):

    Here is Yefimov’s Cyrillic version of the Kis typeface:

    And finally, here is how I am attempting to design this letter in my current work:

    I am not happy with it. While I can manage to balance the letter in isolation, when it appears in the middle of a word during typesetting, it inevitably creates a gaping hole in the upper-right area.

    Then again, perhaps I’m simply not in the habit of using that kind of ligature at all, and that’s why I stumble at that point.
  • John Savard
    John Savard Posts: 1,260
    The capital AE ligature in English achieves compactness by making the right downstroke of the A vertical rather than inclined; clearly, that's an option for a Cyrillic L based on the Greek lambda as well in order to have less of "a gaping hole in the upper-right area".
    Of course it would be nice to have historical precedent to draw upon, and I hope someone will be able to find some for you.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,823
    edited September 29
    I think the shape of your л is introducing a number of problems. The triangular part is small and tight, which makes it difficult to balance with the bowl in the Balkan љ. The lambda shape works best as in Lazurksy and in Bulgarian types, with a pointed apex, allowing the triangular form to fill the x-height.
    It’s difficult to make other suggestions without seeing more of the design.
  • pavljenko
    pavljenko Posts: 10
    It just so happened that I recently came across this interesting example of Serbian Cyrillic...

    The second volume of Pierre-Simon Fournier the Younger's "Manuel typographique" was published in Paris in 1766–1768. The book contains specimens of his typefaces, music notation, vignettes, and a hundred alphabets of various scripts, and also serves as a response to the Gando type foundry. Among these alphabets is a Cyrillic one labeled " Serbian, of Saint Cyril." Fournier assembled it with substitutions and glyph replacements from other writing systems — and it looks utterly extraordinary, as if the letterforms were taken from the 10th century and the style from the 18th. This may have been a necessary measure when urgent support for certain languages had to be added.

    Source: Manuel typographique, utile aux gens de lettres, & à ceux qui exercent les différentes parties de l'art de l'imprimerie — https://archive.org/details/manueltypographi02four/page/224/mode/2up
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,197
    Just... wow. Bizarre.
    Is it just me, or is the Serbian Greek possibly even weirder than the Serbian Cyrillic?
    (Not that it is a contest!)
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,823
    edited October 1
    A lot of the script and language materials in Fournier’s Manuel are essentially fantasies, in which a tradition dating back to the late Middle Ages that includes things like imaginary angelic scripts meets the encyclopedic cataloguing impulse of the enlightenment. James Mosley told me that a lot of the stuff that Fournier reproduces came from one of the German foundries, and much of it is not type per se but woodcut lettering.
  • Dan Reynolds
    Dan Reynolds Posts: 188
    I don’t have it to hand, but in his translation, Harry Carter lists the typefaces that Breitkopf in Leipzig sent to Fournier for the book. These attributions, among other things, are based on correspondence between Fournier and Breitkopf that had survived until at least the 1920s.

    Breitkopf almost certainly must have sent Fournier standing type, not woodcuts (this is not to dispute woodcut lettering in the book!).

    Breitkopf was a customer of Fournier’s as well, and probably had matrices of some Fournier types. Fournier is, astonishingly, the only European punchcutter Breitkopf did not disparage for copying his novel method of manufacturing musical notation type.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,823
    edited October 2
    Thanks, Dan. I was struggling to remember the name Breitkopf yesterday. I’ll go check Carter’s list: it will be interesting to see which, if any, of the weirder things might have originated there.
    I have the section of Diderot’s Encyclopédie about writing systems, which is contemporaneous with Fournier’s manual, and the Serbian Cyrillic shown there is very similar.


  • Dan Reynolds
    Dan Reynolds Posts: 188
    edited October 3
    Sorry, I’m back home today. Carter’s translation has does have a footnote about Breitkopf’s types and where their correspondence had been published. But it is indeed James’s list that has more extensive information. It is in the three-volume edition from Darmstadt that includes two facsimile volumes and one volume with Carter’s traditions and James’s extensive commentary. My mistake!

    Breitkopf provided German-script designs, as well as Samaritan, Syriac, Arabic, Coptic, Armenian, and Ethiopian, but not Serbian. I could not find any attribution for that, and it is not in the index, either.

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