Expand full support of Cyrillic blocks in Ponomar Unicode

[tommai4881]

Since Ponomar Unicode is great, even having Romanian (Moldovan) Cyrillic, Aleut and Sakha (Yakut) letters. Why don't you expand the font include the glyphs of:

• Cyrillic: U+0400–U+04FF, 256 characters
• Cyrillic Supplement: U+0500–U+052F, 48 characters
• Cyrillic Extended-A: U+2DE0–U+2DFF, 32 characters
• Cyrillic Extended-B: U+A640–U+A69F, 96 characters
• Cyrillic Extended-C: U+1C80–U+1C8F, 9 characters
• Cyrillic Extended-D: U+1E030–U+1E08F, 63 characters
• Phonetic Extensions: U+1D2B, U+1D78, 2 Cyrillic characters
• Combining Half Marks: U+FE2E–U+FE2F, 2 Cyrillic characters?

[typiconman]

What is the utility in creating Church Slavonic stylized glyphs that will never be used? It seems like a lot of work for very little result.

[tommai4881]

It will be accessible for all modern-invented post-1918 Cyrillic letters

[tommai4881]

and languages too

[typiconman]

But why would someone need Slavonic stylized letters for modern-invented characters?
Anyway, pull requests are always welcome.

[tommai4881]

Yeah, we should do it, it will be possible for all languages using Cyrillic scripts.

[starover77]

This is completely unnecessary. I am opposed to adding non-Slavonic characters into a font that is designed solely for presenting Church Slavonic texts. If you want to have access to all the extra characters in non-Slavonic languages and alphabets, then simply choose another font which has those characters. There are many other fonts available that can accomplish what you are proposing.

[typiconman]

@starover77 well to be fair, the font is not just designed for Church Slavonic texts: it also supports Aleut, Sakha, Romanian Cyrillic.

[starover77]

@typiconman To be more accurate, for all those non-Slavic languages you mentioned, the ONLY use of the Church Slavonic writing script was for the publication of Orthodox ecclesiastical texts translated into those languages, for which we have already provided complete support in the Ponomar Unicode font. Our font is intended to be used for sacred texts, and its use with non-sacred texts is questionable, controversial and for some people - quite objectionable.

[typiconman]

@starover77 In theory one could use want to use create sacred texts in other languages, too (Mongolian? Komi? what else?)
So I actually don't have any objection to creating additional characters. Just I don't see it to be a particularly valuable use of resources. If someone wants to do it and submit a pull request, fine.

[starover77]

@typiconman I understand your side of the argument, but opening the character range to anachronistic and theoretical constructs could potentially have the detrimental effect of giving "noobies" the impression that these are genuine, documented character forms, and future font developers might feel obligated to include them in all new fonts going forward from here. In all seriousness, I feel that at some point we have to be "gatekeepers" to keep out the element of fantasy and "fakery".

If indeed someone wants to translate liturgical texts into Mongolian, Komi, Mari, Urmut, etc., etc., why would they want to use the Church Slavonic writing script (which has already proven to be a bit challenging for modern users to get comfortable with), when it would be far easier for native speakers of non-Slavic languages to use the modern fonts they are already accustomed to. To do otherwise seems almost like playing a game of "pseudo-medievalism". Even the modern publications of the Moscow Patriarchate have been moving away from the use of the Church Slavonic script to make ecclesiastical texts more accessible, as it has been generally consider that modern church-goers have difficulties reading Church Slavonic texts in the traditional Slavonic letter forms.

If someone wants to go ahead and do this, we can't very well stop them, but I think it's a colossal waste of time and resources for a project that has no proven need, and I personally would not like to see this happen. I think it will could more harm than good. Anyway, at this point I've expressed my thoughts on the matter and I will leave it here. Forgive me.