Add Cyrillic support

[mvasilkov]

Please pretty please :3

[pauldhunt]

It’s on our roadmap.

[shoce]

Star this issue. Source Sans is wonderful, with Cyrillic it will be fantastic.

[davelab6]

Is the roadmap published? :)

[pauldhunt]

I thought that there was a roadmap feature here on GitHub, but either I can no longer find it or I imagined it. Anyway, It seems we are using the issue tracker to track development for now. Open issues are all items that we would like to get to as soon as we can.

Wait: I just noticed I add this to our Milestones.

[miguelsousa]

@davelab6 https://github.com/adobe/source-sans-pro/blob/master/Roadmap.txt

[davelab6]

Ahh, brilliant! Thanks @miguelsousa :) I see the roadmap says to email Paul directly, so I'll do that now :)

[pavel-voronin]

Guys, is cyrillic support adding in progress? How can I help you with this?

P.S.: We crave it!

[miguelsousa]

@pavel-voronin Do you have type design skills or font production skills?

[pauldhunt]

Update: a preliminary version with Cyrillic and Greek is currently being tested here internally at Adobe.

[pavel-voronin]

@miguelsousa unfortunately no, but if you give me a skill tree, i will try to find right person.

[pavel-voronin]

@pauldhunt Is there a way to make this internal testing open?

[davelab6]

@pavel-voronin Please read www.designwithfontforge.com and www.oert.org/en - and file issues on DWFF for anything you need to know that these don't cover. You can get a mac build of FontForge from http://fontforge.github.io/en-US/downloads/mac/ and up to date packages from various distros from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/monkeyiq:/fontforge/

Also you can find a lot of information on Cyrillic at http://learncyrillic.tumblr.com/

[miguelsousa]

@pavel-voronin Not sure what you mean by "skill tree". Dave has pointed to resources that will get you up to speed with FontForge, which you can use for editing the UFOs. Regarding typeface design, this is not a skill that you can learn in a day or two, so I suggest you find someone with proven experience.
Paul has already designed the Cyrillic glyphs, so if I were you I wouldn't spend time with that. If you go to his fork you'll find the Cyrillic glyphs in those UFOs. You can test build them yourself with FontForge, I think.

[davelab6]

There are a few places offering short courses in typeface design, including coopertype.com, reading.ac.uk, and craftingtype.com (which I'm involved in)

[miguelsousa]

Here's a glimpse of the five-week-long studio course at the Cooper Union http://ilovetypography.com/2012/08/24/condensed-typeface-design-program/

[pavel-voronin]

Thank you guys for this bunch of knowledge! I am not gonna to make fonts myself. Moreover, I even failed to compile @pauldhunt's UFO-folder into font file (so lame...). This is so ancient egyptian hieroglyphic culture for me.

But! I am going to find cyrillic speaking (^^) typo hacker, who can help you. But I still don't know exactly who you need to complete the work.

[xeppaka]

Hello, any progress on this enhancement?

[jameswilson]

Another vote for +1 (Cyrillic AND Greek). A popular international travel site I've recently worked on is using Source Sans as a Heading font, but currently having to fall back to Open Sans in Greek, Russian, Polish (for ż and ł, ą, ę) and Turkish (various missing letters with accents). This works, but is not ideal for maintaining brand consistency.

[frankrolf]

James, what are the letters you are missing for Turkish?

[pauldhunt]

@jameswilson the current fonts support Polish and Turkish. check your text encoding. use Unicode.

[davelab6]

James, did you use the latin-ext subset?

[pauldhunt]

Polish:

Turkish:

[pauldhunt]

@xeppaka I hope to roll out Cyrillic and Greek support for the upright styles within the next few months. I cannot give you a specific timeframe at this moment, but you can preview the current state of the font sources (which may or may not compile and are probably reliant on an custom build of our AFDKO tools) on my personal branch: https://github.com/pauldhunt/SourceSansPro/tree/Reconciliation If you can get by with OTF fonts they might actually be in this branch, I don’t remember.

Here is a preview of the current state of the design: I still need to kern small capital letters for Greek and Cyrillic and create TrueType versions of the fonts that include hinting (no small task), and probably tie up some loose ends I am not thinking of here.

Greek:

Cyrillic:

[pauldhunt]

Actually, this gets me thinking... If any of you are native readers of Greek or Cyrillic, could you please download the sources from the branch linked to above and look over the design and make any quibbles you have with particular shapes here and I can try to get things fixed before the first official release. Thanks.

[codeman38]

If you can get by with OTF fonts they might actually be in this branch, I don’t remember.

I've just checked the branch, and there is neither a compiled OTF nor a generated font.txt on which to run makeotf. I tried generating a PFA font from the .ufo using FontForge and saving that as font.txt, but it looks like the composite characters end up getting garbled in the process.

Edit: Got it to work by running Edit -> Unlink Reference and then Element -> Overlap -> Remove Overlap on all glyphs before generating, for anyone else trying this at home.

Edit 2: The culprit for why the fonts are missing from the repo is the .gitignore file, which specifically excludes the generated fonts and any PFA source files.

[miguelsousa]

@codeman38
The latest makeotf supports UFO files, so there's no need to convert to Type 1. I had no problems compiling the Regular from the branch @pauldhunt mentioned.

The missing font binaries in the repo is deliberate; only the source files are tracked here.

[codeman38]

@miguelsousa Ah, so it does! Didn't realize the build I had installed a while ago was outdated. Thanks.

[christoph-wesolutions]

I'm really looking forward to this. Looks great, Paul!

[combdn]

Hello.
I’m a native reader of Cyrillic and have minor experience in letterform design (mostly lettering).
Here is what I see at first glance.

The letter “д” should be more balanced. See my adjustment on the screenshot:

Also “м” seems too narrow. Here is the comparison of Source Sans and PT Sans (made by native designer):

The left “л” leg should be more curvy. It should have a bended metal spring feeling:

And, of course, “д” should be adjusted accordingly.

But overall it looks pretty good.

Update: proportions, of course, are matter of taste and choice. It’s just what I used to see in lower case Cyrillic and what stops my eye in the line.

[pauldhunt]

Cyrillic and Greek will be in the next update.

[wffurr]

Last commit to master was May 2013, when is that next update with Cyrillic support? Will the update also include Greek, Turkish, etc.? e.g. https://www.tripadvisor.com.tr/TripConnect looks pretty bad with the mixed Turkish Arial / Latin Source Sans Pro glyphs.

[frankrolf]

Source Sans Pro already supports Turkish (as you can see in the headlines
on that website), this is more of a problem with the web design decisions
made on the Turkish version of TripAdvisor.

[davelab6]

Yeah, that page has

But it should be

[wffurr]

Aha! Thank you davelab6. I see the character set options to add latin-ext and Vietnamese, which should fix the mixed-font letter business. Now at least it'll be whole words (e.g. brand names in English) that will be mixed font in unsupported languages (Cyrillic, Greek, Korean, etc.)

I had also discovered some users with Source Sans Pro installed locally did not see the same issue with Arial letters:

[davelab6]

I had also discovered some users with Source Sans Pro installed locally
did not see the same issue with Arial letters

Right, because Google Fonts' CSS says to use a locally installed font if
available, and rarely will that be a subsetted version

[jameswilson]

@wffurr, I had Implemented a fallback to Open Sans for Turkish and a variety of other languages on the Insights section:

http://www.tripadvisor.com.tr/TripAdvisorInsights

But it sounds like this could probably be backed out now based on the feedback from @davelab6, and others above.

[miguelsousa]

Just-released version 2.010 has support for Cyrillic (and Greek) in the upright styles only.

[combdn]

About letterforms of “л”, “д”. If you don’t believe me, here is the quick guide by Alexandra Korolkova ( the author of PT Sans and PT Serif, one of the best Russian font designers, awarded with Prix Charles Peignot by ATypI in 2013.)

[jameswilson]

How can we go about getting Google's hosted font to add a &subset=cyrillic-ext and &subset=greek-ext?

[pauldhunt]

AFAIK, Google will not do this until all fonts in the family support Greek/Cyrillic. This means that they will not add the Source Sans fonts until after the italic fonts are also updated with Greek/Cyrillic characters.

[davelab6]

Paul is correct, let me know if you have any questions :)

[jameswilson]

Thanks @pauldhunt @davelab6, I've gone about creating a custom subset for Greek and Cyrillic. Now comes the hard part of figuring out what to include/exclude from the subsets.

[davelab6]

https://github.com/davelab6/pyfontaine/tree/master/fontaine/charmaps has some examples

[davelab6]

@jameswilson how did you get on? :)

[pauldhunt]

@jameswilson what are you trying to accomplish?

[jameswilson]

@pauldhunt since Google won't host the updated Source Sans Pro until the italics is implemented, and my site doesn't use italics, I'm trying to make a subset for Greek and a subset for Cyrillic language using what you currently have built.

@davelab6 I've got it working now, I ended up using Fontie which has easy checkbox options to generate cyrillic or greek subsets. I also tried using the "Expert" panel on FontSquirrel's Webfont Generator to select Cyrillic / Greek languages for building a custom subset, but It totally messed up the EOT files so this was a no-go for Internet Explorer. Sadly, Fontie doesn't produce woff2, so after using fontie, i had to take the resulting TTF from fontie and pass it through an online ttf-to-woff2 converter.

Last but not least, I uncovered a nice IE bug that breaks when using multiple weights for the same font-family name in @font-face declarations. It looks like there is no way around that except to use different font-family names -- but it appears Google Fonts itself doesn't even support this (bug).

When the production release goes live, I'll send you guys a link. Thanks guys.

[pauldhunt]

@jameswilson what do you mean by ‘Cyrillic language’? Russian? Ukrainian? Bulgarian? Russian + Ukrainian? ??? Do you have to use Google fonts? The latest versions are on Typekit, which has recently implemented robust subsetting options.

[jameswilson]

Oops, s/language/characters. Russian is the specific language used on this site.

[fitojb]

regular cyrillic looks good, but italic is ugly :(

Which is nonsense. If you have read this thread more carefully, you would have noticed Cyrillic italics are not yet released. So you’re actually seeing glyphs substituted from another font.

[davelab6]

Or autoslanted, which looks bad

[pauldhunt]

@azamat-sharapov how can a nonexistent italic look ugly? or in other words, please explain yourself.

[azamat-sharapov]

@pauldhunt I'll better remove an inappropriate comment of mine. Looking forward for new releases with italic support though. Thanks.