zum Inhalt springen

Fonts and keyboards

This page collects fonts and keyboard layouts I designed that can be used by Slavists but also other linguists in their work.
Unless indicated otherwise, all this software is offered free to use, share, and modify under the CC-by-sa license.

Fonts

Glagolica Missal DB is a Unicode OpenType font for Angular Glagolitic based on  Glagolica Missal DPG by Nenad Hančić-Matejić. In contrast to the predecessor, all the Glagolitic letters are assigned their designated Unicode positions; the font contains Glagolitic superscript letters and several additional ligatures as well as the letters for đ, , lj, nj proposed by Frane Paro; and ligatures are created automatically using the OpenType feature “ligatures”; additionally, the OpenType feature “old-style figures” can be used to automatically display numbers as Glagolitic numbers.

Fraktur Unicode is a Unicode OpenType font for the “Fraktur” variety of blackletter. It is based on a free font from the 1990s but contains 751 glyphs (including diacritics, stylistic variants, l with loop, the Old Polish nasal vowel ꟁ, and both Heyse’s 〈ſs〉 ligature and Bernolák’s tailed long ſ for 〈š〉). OpenType features include automatic ligatures, four stylistic sets, character variants, localized forms and tag combinations.

Szwabska Unicode is a Unicode OpenType font for the “Schwabacher” variant of blackletter based on the font “Schwaben Alt” by Peter Wiegel. It contains a lot of additional characters for writing not only German and English but also East European languages like Polish, Czech, or Lithuanian (747 glyphs altogether, including diacritics, stylistic variants, l with loop, the Old Polish nasal vowel ꟁ, and both Heyse’s 〈ſs〉 ligature and Bernolák’s tailed long ſ for 〈š〉). OpenType features include automatic ligatures, four stylistic sets, character variants, localized forms and tag combinations.

VecVideo is a sans-serif font based on DejaVu Sans Condensed, which is enhanced for increased readability on presentation slides and especially for linguistic texts, in which it is important that the vowel I and the consonant l can be easily distinguished.

The font is published with a special license that makes it free to use, whereas modifications and redistribution are subject to certain restrictions.

FreeSerif DB is simply FreeSerif with a few improvements and especially the addition of the letter “Old Polish O” (Ꟁ = U+A7C0, ꟁ = U+A7C1), which was used in medieval Polish texts to represent the nasal vowel [ã]. This letter was added to Unicode 14.0 in September 2021 in response to my proposal, but it is currently not yet included in many fonts. (As of February 2023, fonts supporting the Old Polish nasal vowel letter include RomanCyrillic Std and Junicode Two.)

FreeSerif and FreeSerif DB are distributed under a GNU General Public license.

Keyboard layouts

Cyrillic keyboard layouts: Slavonic

vergrößern:
Slavonic (ru)
vergrößern:
Slavonic (bg)
vergrößern:
Slavonic (sr)
vergrößern:
Slavonic (en)
vergrößern:
Slavonic (de)
vergrößern:
Slavonic (fr)

Old Cyrillic keyboard layouts

vergrößern:
Old Cyrillic (Russian)
vergrößern:
Old Cyrillic (Bulgarian)
vergrößern:
Old Cyrillic (Serbian)
vergrößern:
Old Cyrillic (QWERTY)
vergrößern:
Old Cyrillic (QWERTZ)
vergrößern:
Old Cyrillic (AZERTY)

These keyboard layouts have been designed by a working group of the Commission on the Computer-Supported Processing of Mediæval Slavonic Manuscripts and Early Printed Books to the International Committee of Slavists. They are meant for typing Church Slavonic or other Slavic languages in the Old Cyrillic script. Coming in different ‘flavours’ based on existing modern Cyrillic keyboard layouts, they all follow the same basic principles: All preiotated letters can be entered by typing AltGr + the non-preiotated letter. The most important characters and letter variants can also be accessed via AltGr. Three special deadkeys are used for a) less frequently used letter variants; b) combining superscript letters; c) lexicalized variants of o. Multi-dot punctuation marks, number signs, and all the necessary diacritics as well as liturgical symbols can be entered using key combinations that are easy to remember.

Multilingual German keyboard

“Deutsch DB” is a keyboard layout based on the German standard keyboard but with numerous additions for entering lots of characters and diacritics from many (mainly European) languages as well as IPA and for a better control of typography.

Multilingual QWERTY keyboard

“QWERTY DB” is a keyboard layout based on the US/UK standard keyboard with some elements of the “US International” layout and with numerous additions for entering lots of characters and diacritics from many (mainly European) languages as well as IPA and for a better control of typography.

Old Polish keyboard

This is a keyboard based on the Polish “Programmers” keyboard which includes key combinations for characters needed for writing Old Polish, Middle Polish, or Early Modern Polish, e.g. á, é, ꟁ, ſ, ÿ, etc.

Simple Glagolitic keyboard

This Glagolitic keyboard is based on the Croatian/Serbian mapping of the Latin/Cyrillic letters to the keyboard. Using the <AltGr> (or <Ctrl> + <Alt>) key, all the Glagolitic letters in Unicode can be accessed, as well as diacritics and special punctuation marks used in Glagolitic texts.

It depends on the font used whether round or angular Glagolitic characters appear on the screen and the paper. For your convenience, the layout images show the keyboard in both versions.

Old Church Slavonic Glagolitic keyboard

vergrößern:
Glagolitic (Russian)

This Glagolitic keyboard layout is based on the same principles as the Old Cyrillic keyboard layouts above. However, superscript letters are accessed via AltGr key combinations.

Greek Polytonic: one key per diacritic

This keyboard is based on the Greek Polytonic standard keyboard. However, rather than using separate dead keys for all occurring combinations of diacritics (one key for asper + acute, one key for lenis + circumflex + iota subscript, etc.), which I never managed to memorize, it allows combining the standard deadkeys for single diacritics. That is, in order to enter ᾦ, you first push the three separate dead keys for lenis, circumflex, and iota subscript (in any order) and then the key vor ω. Additionally, this approach freed space on the keyboard for a lot of useful characters that cannot be typed using the standard polytonic keyboard.

License

Unless indicated otherwise, all the fonts and keyboard layouts on this page are published under the Creative Commons attribution share-alike license (version 4.0; cc-by-sa). They are therefore free to share and distribute as long as you acknowledge me (Daniel Bunčić) as well as previous authors, where such are mentioned. You may also improve the software and distribute the result as long as you acknowledge my (and other people’s) previous work and share the result under the same conditions.

The keyboard layouts were created using KbdEdit Premium by Ivica Nikolić.

The fonts were created or modified using FontLab Studio 5 and FontLab 7.