Skip to content

slavonic/Pochaevsk

Repository files navigation

Pochaevsk Typeface

Pochaevsk is a contemporary Church Slavonic font that reproduces the typeface used in editions published by the Holy Dormition Pochaiv Lavra in the late 19th century and, subsequently, in editions published in the 20th century by Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York.

Due to its small vertical metrics, this font is convenient for use in bilingual editions featuring Church Slavonic text and text in another language.

Sample Image

History

Pochaevsk originally existed in a variety of ad hoc codepages with variants attributed to different designers: Orthodox Information Data Associates (year unknown); Starina Russian Antiquities, developed by Nikita Simmons (1996); Archbishop John (1999). Reencoded for the Irmologion project by Vlad Dorosh as Pochaevsk Ucs (version 2.1, 2003). Reencoded for Unicode by Aleksandr Andreev as part of the Slavonic Computing Initiative and edited, released under SIL OFL v. 1.1. Edited by Aleksandr Andreev for Google Fonts.

License

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is available with a FAQ at https://openfontlicense.org/.

Building the Fonts

The font is built using fontmake and gftools post processing script. Tools are all python based, so it must be previously installed.

To install all the Python tools into a virtualenv, do the following:

From terminal:


cd your/local/project/directory

#once in the project folder create a virtual environment. 
This step has to be done just once, the first time:

python3 -m venv venv

#activate the virtual environment

source venv/bin/activate

#install the required dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then run the this command:

cd sources
gftools builder config.yaml

The fonts are supposed to build automatically in the repository using GitHub Actions, but this does not work correctly for some reason.

Features

  • Stylistic Set 1 (ss01) changes the hyphen symbol (-) to an underscore (_), which is the default hyphenation symbol used in Synodal Church Slavonic. This can be used for software such as LibreOffice that does not support changing the default hyphenation character.

  • Stylistic Alternatives (salt) are provided for the following characters:

    • a short version of lowercase yat (U+0463)
    • an alternative form of capital omega (U+0460)
    • tiny, short, and long forms of the combining titlo (U+0483)
    • five alternative forms of the Symbol for Mark's Chapter (U+1F545)

See your software's documentation about how to access these glyphs.

More Church Slavonic Fonts

See the main repository and the website.