Cyrillisch

Cyrslav een Cyrslav3N.pfb is gemaakt door dr. Istvžn Sebestyen, Sollnerstraße 10, München, Duitsland, tel. 00-49-89-792597, met het Corel Draw pakket en via het WFNBOSS programma naar PostScript formaat omgezet. Hij bracht het - in juli 1992- in omloop als shareware. This font - as you see it from above - is a Cyrillic Font covering the Slavic European languages writing in Cyrillic, including Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Belorussian and Macedonian (though the origin of the latter is said to be the ancient Greek, but this is not the point here...). There are many other languages, especially on the territory of the former USSR, that have no Slavic roots at all (e.g. Turkish, Georgian, Iranian types...). Those languages - because their strong ties to the former USSR - (still?) use also Cyrillic scripts, but that might perhaps change in the future. Those languages are not covered by this character set, but maybe in a subsequent one. The Slavic Cyrillic script, however, seems to be quite stable. The Cyrillic Slavic set is an 8-bit set, but it can also be used as two 7-bit sets. In that case some sort of code extension, such as used in ISO 2022 is required (although this set does not have an official ISO 'Registration' obviously).

Such a character set is not standardized yet. At this point in time ISO 8859/5 contains an 8 bit-set for mixed Latin/Cyrillic text. This set has a slightly extended Cyrillic repertoire (e.g. the newly 'discovered' Ukrainian 'Ghe with upturn' is also included). Such a set will likely be standardized in the near future by CEN/CENELEC, ETSI (European standardization bodies for IT and Telecom) and CCITT (the most important international Telecom standardization body). But, it takes still some time (say 2 years...). This set is quite close to the planned standard in CEN/CENELEC/ETSI, only some positions are different, plus the standard set will include for compatibility reasons some additional diacritical ('non spacing' characters, which - however - are not significant in a PC environment). This set shows similarities with ISO 6937, which is used especially in Telecommunications (known also as CCITT T.51) for Latin script based languages, with the different that the character repertoire for Cyrillic Slavic is smaller, thus diacritical signs (combination characters) are fortunately not required.