Pochaevsk is a contemporary Church Slavonic font that reproduces the typeface used in editions published by the Holy Dormition Pochaiv Lavra in the late 19th century and, subsequently, in editions published in the 20th century by Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York.

Due to its small vertical metrics, this font is convenient for use in bilingual editions featuring Church Slavonic text and text in another language.

Pochaevsk originally existed in a variety of ad hoc codepages with variants attributed to different designers: Orthodox Information Data Associates (year unknown); Starina Russian Antiquities, developed by Nikita Simmons (1996); Archbishop John (1999). Reencoded for the Irmologion project by Vlad Dorosh as Pochaevsk Ucs (version 2.1, 2003). Reencoded for Unicode by Aleksandr Andreev as part of the Slavonic Computing Initiative and edited, released under SIL OFL v. 1.1. Edited by Aleksandr Andreev for Google Fonts.

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 source is stored in a FontForge SFD file in the sources/ directory. All modifications should be made in FontForge, resulting in an updated SFD file. This file is then converted to UFO format by running the convert script. From terminal:

cd your/local/project/directory
./convert.sh

The font can then be built using fontmake and gftools by running:

make build

Note that this requires Python and will install all of the necessary libraries and tools into a virtualenv at venv/.

To delete the virtualenv and the results of the build, run:

make clean

To build the sample image the sits at the top of this README, run:

make images

The commands make update and make update-project-template update the repository structure and Python dependencies and should be run periodically.

Google's master repository also had a GitHub workflow for building the fonts in the cloud on push, but this seems to always fail because of incorrect dependencies, so has been disabled. Instead, built binaries are stored on GitHub in the fonts/ directory.

This font has been added to Google Fonts and is available for use in Google Docs and other cloud-based software.

• Stylistic Set 1 (ss01) changes the hyphen symbol (-) to an underscore (_), which is the default hyphenation symbol used in Synodal Church Slavonic. This can be used for software such as LibreOffice that does not support changing the default hyphenation character.

• Stylistic Alternatives (salt) are provided for the following characters:

  • a short version of lowercase yat (U+0463)
  • an alternative form of capital omega (U+0460)
  • tiny, short, and long forms of the combining titlo (U+0483)
  • five alternative forms of the Symbol for Mark's Chapter (U+1F545)

See your software's documentation about how to access these glyphs.

See the main repository and the website.