The development of Cyrillic
letter forms passed directly from the
medieval stage to the late
Baroque, without a
Renaissance phase as in
Western Europe. Late Medieval Cyrillic letters (categorized as
vyaz' and still found on many
icon inscriptions today) show a marked tendency to be very tall and narrow, with strokes often shared between adjacent letters.
Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, mandated the use of
westernized letter forms (
ru) in the early 18th century. Over time, these were largely adopted in the other languages that use the script. Thus, unlike the majority of modern Greek typefaces that retained their own set of design principles for lower-case letters (such as the placement of
serifs, the shapes of stroke ends, and stroke-thickness rules, although Greek capital letters do use Latin design principles), modern Cyrillic
types are much the same as modern Latin types of the same typeface family. The development of some Cyrillic
computer fonts from Latin ones has also contributed to a visual Latinization of Cyrillic type.
Lowercase forms ,
De,
I,
Short I,
Em,
Te,
Tse,
Be and
Ve in upright (printed) and cursive (handwritten) variants. (Top is set in Georgia type, bottom in Odessa Script.) Cyrillic
uppercase and
lowercase letter forms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography. Though both Latin and Cyrillic types feature letters whose upper- and lowercase forms differ more in size and proportion than in shape (such as Latin , , ), these form a minority of the Latin alphabet but a majority of Cyrillic (particularly in upright rather than italic forms). Still, a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will include separate
small-caps glyphs. Cyrillic typefaces, as well as Latin ones, have
roman and
italic forms (practically all popular modern computer fonts include parallel sets of Latin and Cyrillic letters, where many glyphs, uppercase as well as lowercase, are shared by both). However, the native typeface terminology in most Slavic languages (for example, in Russian) does not use the words "roman" and "italic" in this sense. Instead, the nomenclature follows German naming patterns: • Roman type is called '
("upright type")compare with ' ("regular type") in German • Italic type is called '
("cursive") or ' ("cursive type")from the German word '''', meaning italic typefaces and not cursive writing •
Cursive handwriting is '
("handwritten type")in German: ' or '''', both meaning literally 'running type' • A (mechanically) sloped oblique type of
sans-serif faces is '''' ("sloped" or "slanted type"). • A boldfaced type is called '''' ("semi-bold type"), because there existed fully boldfaced shapes that have been out of use since the beginning of the 20th century.
Italic and cursive forms Similarly to Latin typefaces, italic and cursive forms of many Cyrillic letters (typically lowercase; uppercase only for handwritten or stylish types) are very different from their upright roman types. In certain cases, the correspondence between uppercase and lowercase glyphs does not coincide in Latin and Cyrillic types: for example, italic Cyrillic is the lowercase counterpart of not of . Note: in some typefaces or styles, , i.e. the lowercase italic Cyrillic , may look like Latin , and , i.e. lowercase italic Cyrillic , may look like small-capital italic . In Standard Serbian, as well as in Macedonian, some italic and cursive letters are allowed to be different, to more closely resemble the handwritten letters. The regular (upright) shapes are generally standardized in
small caps form. Notes: Depending on fonts available, the Serbian row may appear identical to the Russian row. Unicode approximations are used in the
faux row to ensure it can be rendered properly across all systems. In the
Bulgarian alphabet, many lowercase letterforms may more closely resemble the cursive forms on the one hand and Latin glyphs on the other hand, e.g. by having an ascender or descender or by using rounded arcs instead of sharp corners. Sometimes, uppercase letters may have a different shape as well, e.g. more triangular, Д and Л, like Greek delta Δ and lambda Λ. Notes: Depending on fonts available, the Bulgarian row may appear identical to the Russian row. Unicode approximations are used in the
faux row to ensure it can be rendered properly across all systems; in some cases, such as ж with
k-like ascender, no such approximation exists.
Accessing variant forms Computer fonts typically default to the Central/Eastern, Russian letterforms, and require the use of
OpenType Layout (OTL) features to display the Western, Bulgarian or Southern, Serbian/Macedonian forms. Depending on the choices made by the (computer) font designer, they may either be automatically activated by the
local variant locl feature for text tagged with an appropriate
language code, or the author needs to opt-in by activating a
stylistic set ss## or
character variant cv## feature. These solutions only enjoy partial support and may render with default glyphs in certain software configurations, and the reader may not see the same result as the author intended. ==Cyrillic alphabets==