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Notice

These character sets are informative, not normative. They are guidelines. We reserve the right to update, modify, replace or withdraw them at any time without prior notice.


The core of this set, which became the basis of the Cyrillic block in the Unicode Standard and the character set used in Minion Cyrillic (Type 1), was defined by David Birnbaum (Slavic) and Thomas Milo (Turkic and other non-Slavic former Soviet languages) who worked for Bur Davis (Adobe US) and Tony Arcari (Adobe Europe). Thomas Milo's report was written between 1988 and 19901. This core was later complemented with seven characters Ѣ, ѣ, Ѳ, ѳ, Ѵ, ѵ, ә, and became the character set supported by most of Adobe's (Type 1 and Std/Pro) families with Cyrillic support. While defining the Adobe Cyrillic 1 character set, four more characters were added: Ѐ, Ѝ, ѐ, ѝ. The character ә was not included in Adobe Cyrillic 1 because it's only used in languages that require additional characters not covered by this character set. The Ukrainian hryvnia (₴) and the Russian ruble (₽) are also additional characters.

The languages covered by Adobe Cyrillic 1 are: Balkar, Belarusian(Cyrillic), Bulgarian2, Erzya, Karachay, Kumyk, Macedonian, Moksha, Nanai, Nogai, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian(Cyrillic) and Ukrainian.

1 http://blog.typekit.com/2006/08/01/defining_an_ext/#comment-20698

2 Localized forms are only included in fonts that support Adobe Cyrillic 3

This character set is based on the analysis Thomas Phinney did of Cyrillic-based languages, which results he posted at Extending Cyrillic (and later Latin) character sets. The initial plan was to support all the languages up to Group D (inclusive) – thus the sentence That's everything we have tentatively decided to do. There are several more groups that we considered, but are not going to do at this time – and that's what got included in Arno Pro (v1.011), the family being developed at the time. In the meantime, while Thomas designed his own Hypatia Sans and as he concluded the analysis, he decided to support further groups because he considered it was not too much additional work. Subsequently, Robert Slimbach based the character sets of his new families (Adobe Clean, Adobe Clean Serif, Adobe Text) on Hypatia's, and this way it became the de facto set. Adobe Cyrillic 2 supports three additional characters: Ӕ, ӕ (Group I), and the Kazakhstani tenge (₸). However, after further analysis it was decided to drop the 4 characters (Ҝ, ҝ, Ҹ, ҹ) belonging to Group H (Azerbaijani/Azeri and Talysh), because both of these languages are not actively using the Cyrillic alphabet, the characters are complicated to design, and they're not used in any other language.

The additional languages supported by Adobe Cyrillic 2 are: Abaza, Adyghe, Agul, Avar, Bashkir, Buryat, Chechen, Chuvash, Crimean Tatar(Cyrillic), Dargin, Dungan, Ingush, Kabardian, Kalmyk, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Khinalugh, Komi, Kyrgyz(Cyrillic), Lak, Lezgian, Moldovan(Cyrillic), Mongolian(Cyrillic), Ossetian, Rutul, Tabasaran, Tajik, Tat, Tatar, Turkmen, Tuvan, Uyghur(Cyrillic) and Uzbek(Cyrillic).

The additional languages supported by Adobe Cyrillic 3 are: Abkhaz, Altay, Azerbaijani(Cyrillic), Gagauz(Cyrillic), Khakas(Cyrillic), Kurdish(Cyrillic), Mari(Hill and Meadow), Sakha/Yakut, Talysh(Cyrillic), Udi, Udmurt and Yukaghir(Northern and Southern).

Not supported

Languages know to not be supported by any of the current Cyrillic character sets: Chukchi, Enets, Even, Evenki(Cyrillic), Itelmen, Ket(Cyrillic), Khanty/Xanty, Kildin Sami, Koryak, Mansi, Nenets, Nganasan, Nivkh/Gilyak, Selkup and Yupik.