Cyrillic characters and glyphs

A White Paper prepared on behalf of the Commission for Computer Processing of Slavic Manuscripts and Early Printed Books to the International Committee of Slavists This White Paper emerged from discussions among the authors at the Slovo conference that took place in Sofia from 2008-02-21 through 2008-02-26. It is partially a response to three documents published by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences: "Standard of the Old Slavic Cyrillic Script", "Standardisation of the Old Church Slavonic Cyrillic Script and its Registration in Unicode", and "Proposal for Registering the Old Slavic Cyrillic Script in Unicode" The purpose of this White Paper is to provide for the benefit of medieval Slavic philologists: 1. A review of the current state of Unicode with respect to encoding early Cyrillic writing. 2. A brief statement of basic Unicode design principles. 3. An overview of the relationship between character set and font technologies. 4. A response to "Standard","Standardisation", and "Proposal" that provides a realistic perspective on the compatibility of these documents with modern character set standards. 5. A discussion of the possible need for further expansion of the early Cyrillic character inventory in Unicode. 6. A discussion of strategies for meeting the encoding needs of Slavic medievalists in a standards-conformant way. This White Paper is contributed for discussion before and during the September 2008 International Congress of Slavists in Ohrid.

Subject: Language and Literature Studies Unicode 5.1 Cyrillic characters and glyphs