The character щ (CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHCHA) looks wrong in italic under Bulgarian Cyrillic

[skanev]

I noticed that the letter "щ" looks wrong under the Bulgarian cyrillic when in italic. The body of the letter looks like the lowercase "т" (english "m"), but it should be "flipped vertically".

Here's an example:

It should look like the line above.

I'm using the Merriweather provided by Google Fonts. Here's a jsfiddle illustrating the problem: https://jsfiddle.net/ohs608L1/

[EbenSorkin]

I will investigate this over the weekend and can hopefully find the reason for this. It might be that language support Open Type code needs to be updated. Thanks very much for your feedback.

[skanev]

Thanks! I noticed in general that Щ is problematic in Bulgarian Cyrillic - even in “roman” it looks like the International/Russian form, not the Bulgarian one.

[EbenSorkin]

How do you prefer it? What reference shapes do you prefer? There does seem to be a diversity of opinion about what’s best and strong feelings about it. I want to choose forms that tie into the expressive intent of merriweather which is to be Renaissance in temperament and execution. What types do you feel do each of these things well for Bulgarian Cyrillic? Merriweather is also meant to be useful for news government and for arts and cultural purposes. In Bulgarian Cyrillic use what types do you think meet these kinds of typographic needs well?

…

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 6, 2021, at 12:41 PM, Stefan Kanev ***@***.***> wrote:  Your welcome. I noticed in general that Щ is problematic in Bulgarian Cyrillic - even in “roman” it looks like the International/Russian form, not the Bulgarian one. — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.

[skanev]

I'm sorry, I believe I mislead you about Щ in "roman" case.

My personal preference would have been for the upper case of Ц, Ш, Щ to follow the lowercase form (arcs instead of a a straight line in the bottom; it looks really jarring to me in "phrases" like "Щеш-нещеш" to have the capital Щ so different from the lowercase щ), but I erroneously thought that this was the standard form. It's not. Wikipedia's article includes a few samples (vs. "international", or as it calls it, "Russian" Cyrillic). From what I can tell, the best reference is this image, linked on the page (top half says "Traditional form of the Bulgarian Alphabet", bottom one says "Modern form of the Bulgarian alphabet"), and as far as I can tell, Merriweather follows it to the letter, apart from щ.

So please disregard my second reply, unless you wan't to follow the dubious personal preference of a non-professional :)

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Going back to the "щ in italic" issue, I think it's just a problem with the italic version of the font.

I downloaded the Glyphs app, and looking at the glyph files, it seems the source is wrong. I also tried out the variable ttf in the master branch (as opposed the Google's hosted font), and it has the same issue:

Everything seems right, apart from lowercase "щ", which looks like it has its body flipped – it looks like an "m" while it should appear like "ш", but with a descender like "ц"

P.S.: I'd like to take an extra moment to thank you for Merriweather. It's an incredible font and I absolutely love it.

[StefanPeev]

It's very easy to correct the problem. You need to delete uni0449 from class locl and uni0449.loclBGR from class locl2 (in all Italics). Thus the default italic letter form uni0449 (small Cyrillic letter щ) will be used both for international Cyrillic and for Bulgarian Cyrillic as well. They do not differ in their appearance in the italic styles.

[EbenSorkin]

I have neglected this issue but I'll hope to resolve it in the next 30 days. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

…

On Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 3:07 PM Stefan Peev ***@***.***> wrote: It's very easy to correct the problem. You need to delete *uni0449* from class *locl* and *uni0449.loclBGR* from class *locl2* (in all *Italics*). Thus the *default italic letter form uni0449* (small Cyrillic letter *щ*) will be used both for international Cyrillic and for Bulgarian Cyrillic as well. They do not differ in their appearance in the italic styles. — You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#532 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAQUQXKH4RAKRS6MECC55ITT5VI7FANCNFSM4XEY7TYQ> . Triage notifications on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS <https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1477376905?ct=notification-email&mt=8&pt=524675> or Android <https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.android&utm_campaign=notification-email> .

[skanev]

Any chance of resolving this?

[doganov]

I was just about to report the exact same issue, but found it already reported. I can confirm that the problem with the strangely flipped glyph for 0449 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHCHA is only observed on the italic styles.

(I am using the Merriweather TTF files from this repo, not Google Fonts.)

[skanev]

I've tried checking out the repository and fixing this in order to open a pull request, but I failed. If somebody can provide some guidance on how to do it, I'm very happy to make a change and open a PR, as it should be a simple fix. Here's what I tried to do:

• Download Glyphs 3 and open the file. Right out of the bat I got a warning that Merriweather-Italic was created with an old version of the program and it asked me to do some conversion. I tried making a change, but it doesn't want to save.
• I tried to open the file and edit it in Vim, but I got lost at some point and couldn't figure out what to change exactly.
• Finally, I downloaded Glyph 2 and it I managed to edit and remove the glyph. I got this diff which didn't seem perfectly right to me, as it has removed the glyph, but shcha-cy.loclBGR is referred to some other places in the document.

It was all moot, though, because when I tried to build it by following the README in order to test the change, there was no sources/build.sh file.

I'm unsure how to proceed.

[doganov]

It seems like sources/build.sh was removed with commit d2fcfc5f00063d8972e1a1eb56af3d92e273e5f9. BTW, this is a huge tree change, git show --stat reporting:

...
477945 files changed, 62 insertions(+), 92006621 deletions(-)

But there is a clue in the commit message:

    - Use gftools builder

I have no idea whether this helps or not.