Slavonic Font Families

5. Modern Slavonic Fonts

This family includes font designs of the past 30 years which have cast aside all pretense of using historical typefaces as strict models. In some cases this disregard for authenticity was not intentional, but was done by good-intentioned amateur artists who lacked proper education in the principles of typography.

Font Name	Designer (or Redesigner)	Remarks
Altrussisch	?	There are several versions of this font available on the Internet, but the earliest one that can be identified is Altrussisch (1996?), which was distributed through Dr. Berlin's Foreign Font Archive (an old collection no longer distributed on the Internet). The design of this font was used primarily in Carpatho-Russian books and can be seen in the famous "Prostopenie" by Bokshai-Malinich and in other publications from Mukachevo and Preslav. SAMPLE: Redistributions and/or redesigned versions of this font include: • Ciril Studenica (still available from neobyzantine.org) • Drevnerusskij (by R.A. Pavlow) – withdrawn from distribution • Staroslovienina (unidentified) An old commercial distribution of this font is called "Preslav" and is still available from MacCampus. This Latin and Curillic font was designed (adapted?) by Sebastian Kempgen. Another adapted version with Unicode encoding is available for a registered free download from TITUS. Another commercial version of this font is called "MethodStd" and is sold by Sebastian Kempgen at the KODEKS web site (University of Bamberg, Germany) and also at the MacCampus web site.
Izhitsa (and many derived fonts)	Copyright (C) 1990-1992 ParaGraph JV	There are so many versions of this font found on the Internet that is very difficult to determine who was the original designer. This extremely popular font is frequently chosen for its legibility, even though it does not actually represent any historical designs or usage. This is without doubt the most "borrowed" Slavonic font. (To be charitable, I tactfully chose the word "borrowed", when the word "plagiarized" came to mind.) As far as can be determined, ParaGraph JV was the original designer or distributor. SAMPLE: Redistributions and/or redesigned versions of this font include: • Art (unidentified) • Bulgarian Church (unidentified) • Church New AI (Copyright (C) 1995 by Andrei Izotov, Moscow State University) • Cyrillica Bulgarian (Copyright 1992,93,94 by SynthesisSoft. All right reserved.) • CyrillicOld Bold (Copyright VNLabs 1992) • Flavius0 (unidentified) • Izhica, Izhitsa, Izhitsa Cyrillic, IzhitsaC, IzhitsaCTT, IzhitsaN, Izhitza, Izitsa, Cirknov (Izhitsa), etc. • Izhitza Durnovo & Izhitza Accented (by A. Kassian) • Kiev (by Ilya Talev) • Kirillica Nova Unicode (Copyright (c) 1999 by Christoph Singer) • Macedonian Church (© 1998 Marijanco Galevski, Inventif Systems. All Rights Reserved.) • Mria (1993, unidentified) • Sergij (1994, unidentified) • Slavjansky (2006, unidentified) • Ustav Script (unidentified; Modification from 'Sintagma' publisher) • Vedi (by Alexey Isaev, 2001?)
Kirillica Wincyr	?	This crude font is based on "Evangelje" from Dr. Berlin's Foreign Font Archive (no longer distributed on the Internet). SAMPLE:
Leonid Madorsky fonts (commercial)	Leonid Madorsky	Leonid Madorsky of Australia designed a number of Cyrillic fonts back in the 1980s and 1990s, which he did not heavily promote. Sadly, as the years have gone on, he seems to have "dropped off the radar". Also, since Geocities has discontinued hosting their web sites, there seems to be no way for Mr. Madorsky to continue to distribute his fonts or for people to contact him. (I was in contact with him several years ago, and I will attempt to contact him again in hopes of making his fonts available in the future.) He designed three very innovate Slavonic-inspired fonts, each containing both Latin and Cyrillic scripts (samples to be included in the future): • Church2 (a decorative Viaz' style font, suitable for titling) • OldChurch2 (a redesign of Izhitsa, above) • OldCyrillic2 (a redesign of Izhitsa, above)
SBibSlav	Copyright (c) Yegor Nachinkin, 2000. All rights reserved.	This uniquely designed font is (was?) distributed as part of a package for displaying the full Church Slavonic Bible on the internet. (There are other fonts for Greek, Latin and Russian, to be used with other translations of the Bible.) Unfortunately, the web site that was distributing the Bible texts and the fonts seems to have disappeared from the Internet. Perhaps this is also due to the unfortunate fact that Slavonic font was designed with its own unique character encoding that resembled nothing else available (and thus the entire Slavonic Bible was encoded without regard to existing encoding standards). [A competent programmer should have no problem converting the entire Bible to Unicode, providing that the text files can be located on the internet. This is a project waiting to happen... Any volunteers?] SAMPLE:
Slovo	?	This interesting Serbian font (designer unidentified, dated 1996-97) is rather difficult to categorize. In some respects it is quite conservative and almost matches the Russian Synodal Era fonts, but there are far too many innovate characteristics (strokes and serifs) to categorize it as such. It is really quite a gem in font design, but its letter forms make it better suited for titling than for text. It is available from CrkvenoSlovenski. SAMPLE:
Starosta Roman (commercial font)	Juhani Lehtiranta	Copyright JL-types KY 1992. All rights reserved. (Nurmijärvi, Finland) This expensive commercial font is not actively marketed, but it can still be purchased through the JL-types web site. However, its design is non-standard (including an excessive use of serifs and odd letter forms), which makes it a poor choice for legibility. SAMPLE: