28.01.2015 Views

Download - Российский комитет Программы ЮНЕСКО ...

Download - Российский комитет Программы ЮНЕСКО ...

Download - Российский комитет Программы ЮНЕСКО ...

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

168<br />

Sergey BOBRYSHEV<br />

Commercial Director, ParaType Inc.<br />

(Moscow, Russian Federation)<br />

Emil YAKUPOV<br />

Director, ParaType Inc.<br />

(Moscow, Russian Federation)<br />

Multilingual Fonts for Visual Communications<br />

Russia is a vast and polyethnic country, perhaps the vastest and most polyethnic<br />

in the world. More than two hundred languages are used in its territory,<br />

belonging mainly to four language families: Indo-European, Altaic, North<br />

Caucasian and Ural. For the most part, the languages of peoples of Russia<br />

are based on the Cyrillic alphabet, but there are languages that use Latin and<br />

other writings, as well as oral languages. Russia as a multinational country has<br />

accumulated a solid experience of friendly coexistence of various nations.<br />

In such a country, the most obvious integrating element is not the territory and<br />

certainly not the language. All of us, the people of the Russian Federation, are<br />

united by our writing and its graphic tools, the fonts.<br />

Therefore, in 2009 while initiating a project to develop a nationwide font<br />

typeface for the title languages of subjects of the Russian Federation the<br />

ParaType Inc. set the following goals:<br />

• creating enhanced language support fonts for the languages of Russia,<br />

• replacement commercial fonts with free/libre fonts,<br />

• replacing western design with domestic for Cyrillic fonts,<br />

• creating a set of fonts for a wide range of applications.<br />

These goals conform to the Federal Law “On languages of the peoples of the<br />

Russian Federation” granting all languages of the peoples of our country equal<br />

rights for preservation and development, guaranteeing the right for education in<br />

native languages, and fixing the Cyrillic as the writing system.<br />

At present the process of formation and regulation of national languages’ use<br />

is gaining momentum both in our country and throughout the world, regional<br />

laws on languages are being elaborated and adopted. This process should be<br />

accompanied by the creation of high-quality national fonts to be freely available.<br />

However in order to develop fonts supporting national characters knowledge<br />

of both the composition of national alphabets and the form of these glyphs’<br />

representation is required. Today, the Unicode standard determines most of them.

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!