News & Goals
Here are the latest developments at the Ponomar Project:
- May 27, 2015: Ponomar Unicode, a Church Slavonic font in Unicode, has been released. (download >)
- May 27, 2015: Ponomar PUA (Private Use Area) Allocation Policy version 2.0 is released (find out more >)
- April 14, 2014: Menaion Unicode BETA 1.3 released. It includes combining Glagolitic characters proposed for encoding in Unicode (download >; read proposal for addition Glagolitic characters)
- April 13, 2014: Slides from Aleksandr Andreev's presentation at the Russian Academy of Sciences Library on issues of encoding Znamenny neumatic notation (see Music page >; read proposal draft)
- March 1, 2014: RussianMission BETA 0.5 released. This is a font for working with Han characters used in texts of the Russian Mission in China and Japan (download >)
- November 19, 2013: Fedorovsk Unicode BETA 2.1 released. It includes a few minor bugfixes and tweaks (download >)
- September 4, 2013: Lingua::CU Perl API published on our GitHub repository (go there >)
Our Goals
Our goals are to develop fully-configurable software that assembles liturgical offices, and provides other liturgical information, as well as other tools for working with liturgical texts and liturgical music in a wide variety of languages. More specifically, we strive to create software that provides:
- Perpetual calendar data: a calendar with listing of commemorations and readings for any day of any year (Go to the online menologion >)
- Comprehensive listings of saints, hagiography and iconography
- Complete liturgical instructions for any day of any year
- Complete library of liturgical texts in many languages
- Configruable service assembler
- Extensive library of patristic commentary and other patristic texts in a variety of langauges
- Extensive library of liturgical music in traditional Byzantine, Znamenny, and related chant systems
- Tools for working with a variety of liturgical information that assist with such tasks as preparing for divine services, compiling calendars and liturgical instructions, creating musical scores, typesetting liturgical texts, creating parish bulletins, or even preparing for a homily
- Internationalization: presently we have support for Church Slavonic, English, French, Chinese, and Greek. Support for other langauges is forthcoming.
Our Philosophy
At Ponomar, we believe that liturgical information ought to be: FREE, PORTABLE, FLEXIBLE
- FREE: that is, free of charge and free from Copyright restrictions. St John did not copyright the Octoechos nor did Sts Cyril and Methodius copyright their translations. You can take anything from this site and use it for any purpose, provided that you give us credit. If you choose to distribute your modifications, you must do it under the same licensing scheme.
- PORTABLE: we strive to use the most modern, open source computing standards to ensure that you are not limited to one operating system and don't have to use proprietary software or obscure file formats.
- FLEXIBLE: where possible, we put data in text format so that you can load it into your favorite word processor, layout manager or music editor. You shouldn't have to deal with extracting text from PDF or running sheet music through music OCR software.
In addition, we believe that information ought to be of the highest quality. That is, liturgical texts should be typeset using modern fonts, with proper kerning, hyphenation, and other features. There is no reason why you should put up with faded print, hardly visible font size, or typographical errors.
WE NEED YOU! The Ponomar Project is entirely the work of enthusiasts. We urgently need your help with a variety of technical and non-technical tasks. If you can devote time to the project, contact us.
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