Font »Croatica« [Glagolica Fonts & Co.]

As I began to develop the font I also read quite a bit about typography. In an article about various scripts I found out that experts differentiate mature scripts from those that are immature by seeing if capital letters differ from lower case letters, and if these have varying ascenders and descenders, so that the written text is easier to read. I also wanted to do these requirements justice by the development of the font.

In designing the letters I have standardised their forms as much as possible with the goal of designing a modern standard font with serifs, similar to the well-known “Times New Roman”.

In total I have invested around four year's work of my leisure time in this project and I finally finished the font in April 2009. It's not easy for me to say which geographical or historical influences are reflected in my font. You could say that it ties various traditions from different regions and centuries of Croatian Glagolitic culture together. For this reason I have named the font simply “Croatica”.

I believe I have provided almost all the Glagolitic letters that were used in the past, and some variations and ligatures (as no cursive equivalents exist for the older letters that were not used any more in Croatia, I created some myself); additionally also the Glagolitic numbers and all important punctuation marks and other special symbols, so that the font contains more than 260 characters.

My aim was for the font to find use not only for the contemprary Croatian language, but also for all other Glagolitic and (Old)Church Slavonic texts.

The only current problem with this font is the inadequate unicode and the keyboard coding. I found a solution for writing/typing (unfortunately a transliteration is not possible), but lobbying the Unicode Consortium from different sides could and should done for the expansion of the Glagolica unicode.

It is my wish that the font be made available for use for all interested persons and institutions that are concerned with this topic.

Click here for the translation of the Glagolitic text in the Cathedral of Zagreb

The font works best with

But it is useable with other software as well.

There are some particulars that should be noted so that the “Croatica” font can be used without any problems.

The best results are achieved with the latest version of OpenOffice.org on the PC.
This can be downloaded via the link on this Internet site.
The best font sizes are those between 16 and 20pt.
Printing works best if the printer is set to standard print quality or higher.

Please note that the keyboard language should be set to “German” {DE Deutsch (Deutschland)} on the desktop before you start. I chose this constellation because with this way most of the possible ligatures can be typed in without difficulty. Together with the font I have prepared a keyboard layout file for download which can be placed next to the keyboard as a guide while using the “Croatica” font.