The locl variant for Macedonian and Serbian languages of lowercase BE (U+0431, б ) looks incorrect. It looks like Greek lowercase delta δ. Similar bug is filled for Liberation fonts https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1574410 The reason for the bug is that the Wikipedia pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_(Cyrillic) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script#Letterforms_and_typography incorrectly state that BE has different form in Macedonian and Serbian. The information is not even cited. I have NEVER EVER seen that delta look in ant printed book, old or new. Both for Macedonian and Serbian. Moreover I can cite official orthography documents where BE is written as usual, same as in Russian. Here is Macedonian orthography, scroll to page 13/368 http://www.pravopis.mk/sites/default/files/Pravopis-2017.PDF Here is Serbian orthography, scroll to page 18 http://repo.etfovac.com/srpski-jezik/Pravopis%20MS_2010.pdf
I'd note that the delta look may remain in Italic forms because Italic forms are close to handwriting. Simply put, Serbian and Macedonian should not have any localized shapes (locl feature) in regular and bold and other non italic variants, only in italic variants.
What about https://web.archive.org/web/20180130091240/jankojs.tripod.com/SerbianCyr.htm ?
That source is obviously incorrect, that is why I filled this bug report. I cited much more reliable sources. I analyzed this a further bit and came to this: For Macedonian, the delta look has never ever been used historically or in printed practice. Even in italic. It is only handwritten lowercase BE that look a little bit like the delta. I can cite you as much as you want books, textbooks, grammars, orthographies and dictionaries. For Serbian the delta look may have been used historically, but in practice the six look is used. I have found one another site which is somewhat closer than wikipedia https://localfonts.eu/typography-basics/fonts-the-importance-of-localisation/local-features/serbian-cyrillic-feature-locl/ https://localfonts.eu/typography-basics/fonts-the-importance-of-localisation/local-features/macedonian-cyrillic-feature-locl/ But even these have missing stuff, e.g. they miss Cyrillic GJE in italic ѓ. For Macedonian, I can confirm: 1. Regular, Bold, Oblique don't need any localization 2. Italic needs localized shapes for the following chars: д г ѓ п т, and б may be optionally localized only in italic. The design of lowercase italic г and ѓ should not be based on latin italic i, but on italic ш by taking the leftmost arc and adding the macron diacritic for Г and both macron and acute accent for Ѓ. All this is true for Serbian, with the possibility that lowercase BE should be localized in regular. But as I said, even Serbian readers are more accustomed to the standard six shape.
Any chance of fixing this? The patch is already there. As for lowercase italic GE and GJE (г, ѓ) I will open another issue. For them it is also acceptable to take the standard italic and just add the macron. No need to cut italic SHA (ш). We will discuss that in a separate issue, this one is more important.
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