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Does anybody know?

According to these fonts' properties:

Cambria: "Authors: Monotype Imaging and Tiro Typeworks".
Calibri: "Authors: Luc(as) de Groot"

hi John, what is the issue?

Theunis — Cambria was designed by Jelle Bosma (with Steve Matteson & Robin Nicholas of Monotype). Not sure what Tiro is doing in the font properties. Are you sure you didn’t mistakenly check Constantia (John Hudson’s contribution) instead?

I’m always mixing up those C faces, myself.

hi Kent, Tiro/John Hudson, did much of the work on the Math additions to the font.

Ross did most of the Cambria Math work, although some of it based on Jelle's initial work. I did most of the the languages extensions for the Win7 versions of Cambria Regular and Italic, with David Březina working on the bold weights.

The issue regards capital Cyrillic letters in italics with combining diacritics.

Can you give examples, illustrations of the issue? Also, which versions of the fonts are you using? The initial, Windows Vista versions did not support mark positioning; the Win7 versions do.

Hello, John.

Yes, I can give you a screenshot. I've been doing some experimenting in Word (yup) and the issue arose when I wanted to use what Word calls "contextual alternates", ie. italic Cyrillic letters different from Russian ones. In order for that to work, I had to pick as a language the most bizarre thing ever Serbian (Cyrillic, Serbia and Montenegro (former)) and then select standard ligatures and contextual dialogues in Font properties.

This is what I get

The question is: how does one get the correct italics and correctly combined diacritics with capital Cyrillic letters?

Which Cambria version is the most recent? 5.93?

Okay, I've looked into this and found a problem in the VOLT source for the Cambria Italic and Cambria Bold Italic fonts: the 'ccmp' feature lookup that substitutes the cap versions of above combining marks for subsequent positioning when preceded by an uppercase letters is not mapped to the feature in the Serbian 'SRB' language system. So far as I can tell, this only affects the Italic and Bold Italic fonts.

Thanks for catching this. I'll get this logged as a bug and will send a fix to Microsoft today. I can't say how or when they will get the fix released, though.

Thank you very much! I have to ask: when this gets fixed, will it be available as an Windows (Office) Update? How does Windows update its fonts? And also will this enable these alternates also to be used with the simple Serbian (Cyrillic)?

Sylph, is the issue in Calibri the same? Or did you want to report a different problem?

The issue in Calibri is similar. I will post a screenshot.

Could you answer my question: do you know how will Microsoft release the fix? Thank you.

They're misplaced, leaning to the right.

In Constantia it doesn't work at all. I haven't checked the other Microsoft typefaces.

I'll ask Microsoft to look into this Calibri issue. It looks like the substitution of the cap accent forms (ccmp) is working fine, but the positioning (mark) is not. Possibly this is another situation with a lookup not being correctly associated with the SRB language system.

This is not expected to work in Constantia: of the original ClearType font collection, only Cambria, Calibri and Consolas were extended and mark positioning added for Windows 7.

I don't know how Microsoft will release a fix. Typically, critical bugs get rolled out using the Windows Update mechanism, but font issues are seldom considered critical in this sense.

Thanks John A for reporting the problems with these fonts. As John Hudson indicated, Microsoft is rarely able to update fonts via Windows Update. The fixed fonts will likely ship with the next version of Windows.

Thanks, Si

Oh, OK. Thank you, John! I figured that it will ship with the next installment of Windows, as Sii says.

As for Constantia, I was just wondering why do the combining diacritical marks exists when they don't work properly. I thought typeface designers checked if all of that worked well. Segoe is another such typeface.

A subset of combining mark characters are supported in Constantia and many other fonts without mark-to-base GPOS support in order to be able to create precomposed diacritic composites using these glyphs. It would be possible to do the same thing while leaving these glyphs unencoded, but that would result in a bigger fail when these characters occur in text, since the font wouldn't be able to display them at all.

Oh, I see. Of course. Thank you for all your help and explanations!

Also, in Cambria, is the Combining Ring Below supposed to look like this? With the Cyrillic r it doesn't even show up.

Here is what I get with XeLaTeX (Russian left, Serbian right) using Cambria italic.

Could you share the document preamble? Why does it differ that much? And how does XeLaTeX know how to use the correct italics forms?

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia} 
\setmainfont[Script=Cyrillic]{Cambria}
\setdefaultlanguage{russian}
\setotherlanguages{serbian}
\newfontfamily\serbian[Script=Cyrillic,Language=Serbian]{Cambria}
\begin{document}%\color{blue}
\large\itshape
м̥р̥д̥б̥\quad\textserbian{м̥р̥д̥б̥}
\end{document}

That is the full input.

The line with \newfontfamily\serbian can be deleted.