Unicode

The publication provides full documentation for the project "Repertorium of the Old Bulgarian Literature and Letters", a long-term initiative of the Department of Old Bulgarian Literature at the Institute of Literature (Bulgarian Aacademy of Sciences), which is based on XML technologies. The guidelines include an overview both of the principles and techniques of encoding with explanation of different options and solutions for the description of the Slavic manuscripts drawing on scholars experience. Numerous examples illustrate mark up used in the electronic description of the codicology, textology and language of the medieval manuscripts.

Subject: Literary Texts Repertorium initiative XML TEI P5 Unicode

Recent developments in Unicode have made it possible for a large variety of historic characters of the Slavic languages to be correctly encoded in Unicode. However, there are some areas which require additional work, and for other problems, several solutions co-exist. A puzzling problem arises when texts contains obvious errors, especially so if one single text is the only available source for the claimed existence of a specific letter. The Glagolitic "Pe" character is such a character, and because it represents such a unique case, it paper will present a fresh look at the original source (the famous "Munich Abedarium") and its interpretation.

Subject: Language studies Unicode Glagolitic script Slavic paleography

The author has developed and released two high-quality free fonts for the scientific community, RomanCyrillic Std and Kliment Std. The latter font has already been introduced in a separate paper (see Scripta & e-Scripta, 3–4/2006); the purpose of this paper is to introduce the RomanCyrillic Std font which has originally been released at the same time as Kliment Std, but has been considerably updated and expanded. The licensing conditions of the font allow it to be freely used for any scholarly research and publication. For any user of the font this has two important consequences: 1) The font is fully licensed and legal to use which means it does not violate anyone else’s copyrights. 2) This also means that the font may not be altered, modified, changed, renamed etc. by the end-user. The font is made available as a Unicode 5.0 OpenType font in TrueType format. It can be used on Windows PCs as well as Macintoshes – there is only one font file for use on both platforms. This means that there is complete compatibility and interoperability between these two platforms for any documents that use this font. The same is true for web-sites that assume the presence of a specific font in their html code. The font contains supplements: Latin alphabet, Cyrillic, Glagolithic, Cyrillic characters with special diacritics, and Greek fonts with special characters (monotonic as well as polytonic), IPA characters, and other symbols. As the content and the location of the Old-Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet in the Unicode space has not yet been established, the font has the possibility to evolve, in order to adequately reflect all requirements of this standard.

Subject: Language and Literature Studies TTF fonts OpenType font Platform compatibility Latin alphabet Cyrillic alphabet Glagolithic alphabet Greek alphabet Unicode