Vilnius is a typeface designed to mimic the fonts used by the Mamonichi Press in Vilnius, which produced important editions in the late 16th and early 17th century. It is intended for reproducing Ruthenian publications from that era.
Vilnius is based on Ostrog, designed by Vlad Dorosh. It was reencoded for Unicode by Aleksandr Andreev as part of the Slavonic Computing Initiative and edited by Nikita Simmons, released under SIL OFL v. 1.1 and distributed as Vilnius.
This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is available with a FAQ at https://openfontlicense.org/.
The font is built using fontmake and gftools post processing script. Tools are all python based, so it must be previously installed.
To install all the Python tools into a virtualenv, do the following:
From terminal:
cd your/local/project/directory
#once in the project folder create a virtual environment.
This step has to be done just once, the first time:
python3 -m venv venv
#activate the virtual environment
source venv/bin/activate
#install the required dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
Then run the this command:
cd sources
gftools builder config.yaml
The fonts are supposed to build automatically in the repository using GitHub Actions, but this does not work correctly for some reason.
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The font provides a number of ligatures, which are made by inserting the Zero Width Joiner (U+200D) between two characters.
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Stylistic Set 10 (“Equal Baseline Variants”) sets the capital letters on the same baseline as the lowercase letters (useful for working with the font in an academic context where the traditionally lowered baseline of uppercase letters can cause vertical spacing issues when working with text that is both in Latin and Cyrillic scripts).
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Stylistic Alternatives (salt) are provided for the following characters:
- alternative form of U+0426 Capital Tse
- lower truncated forms of U+0434 de, U+0440 re, U+0443 u, U+0444 ef, U+0445 khe, U+0446 tse, U+0449 shche, U+0463 yat, U+0471 psi, U+A641 zelo
- alternative form of U+0478 digraph uk
- alternative form of U+1C88 variant uk
- upper trunctated forms of U+A64B uk
See your software's documentation about how to access these glyphs.
See the main repository and the website.