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Font Formats: PostScript Type 1, Open Type, Multiple Master
What is Unicode?
Code Pages
Technical Issues
Font Licensing
Supported Font Formats for HermesSOFT Typefaces


PostScript Type 1
All HermesSOFT typefaces are available in PostScript Type 1 format, DTP industry leading digital font format. All fonts are carefully digitized by IKARUS system. Special tools are used for hinting and kerning improvement. HermesSOFT makes typefaces, available in all code pages for MAC OS and WINDOWS, for high quality multi-lingual typesetting. Click the link | Code Pages | for complete information about code pages supported.

Multiple Master Font Format
Currently some HermesSOFT typefaces are developed in Multiple Master format (MM). The HermesSOFT Multiple Master typefaces are the first Cyrillic fonts for Windows. Find out more ...

OpenType Font Format
OpenType is a new font format that has been developed by Adobe and Microsoft., that can be viewed as a superset of TrueType and PostScript, with added capabilities for advanced typography. The first specifications were published in 1997, but the first OpenType fonts were released in 2000.
Main Advantages of OpenType format
OpenType supports Unicode, this is why OpenType fonts can contain large character sets with more than 65,000 glyphs. Due to the use of Unicode OpenType fonts have much better language support.
OpenType is supported directly by the OS (Windows 2000 or higher; Mac OS X or higher).
OpenType fonts provide cross-platform compatibility.
Why OpenType? Find out more ...

True Type
True Type fonts from HermesSOFT Type Library are available for WINDOWS 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP in all supported code pages.

Unicode encoding of Characters


Unicode addressing of characters allows typesetting in more than 40 languages at once and in ONE font.

Most character sets and character encoding schemes developed in the past are limited in their coverage, usually supporting just one language or a small set of languages. With traditional PostScript Type 1 fonts it was impossible to have more than 256 characters in a single font. No single encoding could contain enough characters: for example, the European Union alone requires several different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a single language like English no single encoding was adequate for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use. These encoding systems also conflict with one another. That is, two encodings can use the same number for two different characters, or use different numbers for the same character. Unicode changes this by adding a global standard for character encoding, which allows the exchange of documents set in different or multiple languages and scripts. A Unicode compliant font would ensure that a Unicode compliant document would display and print properly, regardless of the system being used.

What is Unicode?

If you use Macintosh computers, you will know that the basic character set for a Mac is called 'MacRoman'. There are other character sets defined by Apple for different regions of the world (MacGreek, MacCyrillic, MacCentralEuropean etc). MacRoman can contain no more that 256 characters (1byte, 8bits, or 16 x 16), 35 of these characters have to be control characters (tab, return and word spaces etc), so the maximum number of characters in a Mac font cannot exceed 221.

Unicode however is not restricted to one byte coding, it's an evolving code system that aims to cover as many scripts, languages and dialects as is applicable. At present Unicode is based on two bytes to define character code points (2byte = 16bits, 256 x 256 or 65,536 codes), so a single font can contain characters for east and west European languages, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic... etc..
For more information on the Unicode standard, go to unicode.org

In general, the Unicode specification only covers differences that have a linguistic impact, such as accented characters. It does not deal with typographic niceties such as unusual ligatures, old style numbers, or small caps. The result is that simply adding Unicode capability is very useful for non-English or multi-lingual typography.

Unicode character encoding is directly supported by Windows NT/2000/XP and Mac OS 8.5/9.x/X.

Character Sets and Code Pages


HermesSOFT fonts are based on standard (Windows and Mac OS) and additional (Bulgarian) code pages. A code page (encoding) defines a list of characters in a font. Code pages are usually defined to support specific languages or groups of languages which share common writing systems. Thus, Western encoding supports languages of Western Europe, Central European encoding supports languages of East and Central Europe, Turkish encoding supports Turkish language, Cyrillic Standard encoding supports languages based on Cyrillic alphabet and so on. All referenced encodings support English alphabet.

Available Macintosh Code Pages
Click the item to open a sample with a code page.

Encodings Supported languages

Central European (CE)

all Central European languages as: Albanian, Czech, Hungarian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian/Latin;
Cyrillic (CYR) all Cyrillic languages as: Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian/Cyrillic, Ukrainian;
MAC Roman / US all West European languages as: Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Belgian, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian, Standard), Spanish (Trad. sort, Mexican), Swedish;
Greek (GRE) Greek (monotonic);
Turkish (TUR) Turkish;
Croatian (CRO) Croatian;
Romanian (RUM) Romanian;
Icelandic (ICL) Icelandic;
Bulgarian (BG) Full Bulgarian alphabet incl. vowels with accents, and English;
Phonetic (PHO) Phonetic symbols according IPA.

Available Windows Code Pages
Click the item to open a sample with a code page.

Encodings Supported languages

WCP 1250
Central European

all Central European languages as: Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian/Latin;
WCP 1251 Cyrillic all Cyrillic languages as: Bulgarian, Byelorussian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian/Cyrillic, Ukrainian;
WCP 1252 Western all West European languages as: Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, Belgian, English, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (Brazilian, Standard), Spanish (Trad. sort, Mexican), Swedish;
WCP 1253 Greek Greek (monotonic);
WCP 1254 Turkish Turkish;
WCP 1257 Baltic Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian
WCP Bulgarian Full Bulgarian alphabet incl. vowels with accents, and English;
WCP Phonetic Phonetic symbols according IPA.



OpenType PRO
HermesSOFT currently offers
special OpenType PRO fonts.
See details ...

Font Utilities
These language resources,
utilities, and macroses
give you the troubleshooting
help you need.
Find out more ...

Expert Support
Improved support
for multi-lingual problems
on Macintosh and Windows.
See Details ...

Old Cyrillic and Glagolitic
Description of the Font Set
Main Advantages
UNIQUENESS
Enablers. See Details ...

For more information, technical and sales questions, please contact HermesSOFT

typefaces
updated 10/19/07