RogerBW's Blog

Someone sent me a link to a fan-made Traveller setting based on a USSR-derived interstellar power. And it's pretty interesting, except for the Cyrillic Thing.

The book is Kosmos 68 by Paul Elliott, and as I start to read it I get a sense that something is wrong. Every header is set in a special sans-serif typeface, I assume to make it "look Russian"; it may be that for some people that is the effect it has. To me, as someone actually able to read Cyrillic, it just looks wrong.

Д ("de") is used for for A, and Я ("ya") for R, and И ("i") for N, and Ш ("sha") for W, and Ч ("che") for Y… and it makes me itch. And that Є isn't a (modern) Russian character at all, it's Ukrainian; Э ("e") is Russian, and it's even pronounced "e" rather than "ye", though it's quite unusual and mostly used in foreign loanwords.

The font in question appears to be Kyrilla Sans Serif by Manfred Klein. Shame on you, sir.

It's an exoticisation and an othering: Those People have this weird script, we can't be bothered to learn it but we'll use it to look cool. We mostly know better now than to do it with other people's religions; can we stop doing it with their writing too? It is a constant niggle that irks me each time I try to read the thing.

But I was already somewhat sensitised to this because of the fifth edition of Chivalry and Sorcery. (What, Roger, are they still doing C&S? Why yes, yes they are, for values of "they" that don't include the original authors who are now dead; it's up at the Bundle of Holding until 26 April.)

Because I receive promotional copies of many Bundle offers I took a look. And there was a similar itch as I tried to read it, as if ants were crawling over the page. So I looked closely…

Yes, every "st" and "ct" has a ligature. Now I think this is Palatino Linotype, which is not at all a bad thing if you use it normally; this turning on of ligatures must be a conscious choice by whoever did the markup or layout. It's a constant drag at my reading attention while I'm trying to parse a complex meaning out of text that's perhaps not always phrased as clearly as it might be.

(In some places they also use Minion Pro, another free seriffed font that looks quite similar. And Microsoft's Georgia is embedded in the PDF too. And Times New Roman. Why do you need four basically similar fonts in the same document, as well as both Arial and Swiss721? You don't. It's a distraction.)

I'm not a font geek dammit. I'm not That Guy who goes to see a WWII or Great Depression film and shouts "but that's Helvetica!". But I do have a basic sense of design and layout, and it particularly irks me when someone has made a text less readable not through laziness – I have a profound respect for laziness – but through deliberate choices.