History of the Arian AMU font
In 1998 author has created a font Arial AM for the Armenian Office of the UNDP, specifically to work in the Armenian sector of the Internet in the ArmSCII-8 encoding, which was distributed with keyboard driver ArmNLS2.0, created by Hovik Melikyan.
When the ABBYY company added support of the Armenian language for your OCR application FineReader needed Armenian font in Arial AM quality, but in Unicode. In the font Arial AM Armenian glyphs were duplicated with the addition of Unicode encoding. Converted font was named Arial AMU and was distributed with the package FineReader. However, this font has two serious drawbacks associated with the fact that it maintained an 8-bit area.First, users could not immediately figure out which of the two encodings is in use, and secondly, because the quotes are used for the Armenian language coincided with 8-bit Armenian comma and “ե” in Armenian texts they appear instead of quotes.
To solve this problem and fix other shortcomings of the font, the author decided to create a completely new version from scratch. First, a new font, which was no longer have an 8-bit range and were added italic and bold italic styles were distributed under the same name.
Later, to avoid confusion, the font was renamed the “Arian AMU”. His first release completely matched with the latest version of “Arial AMU”, but further versions are significantly different from him.
Finally, with the support of the ARGA Foundation was established family of fonts Arian, which, in addition to his includes fixed-width font Arian AMU Mono and a serif font Arian AMU Serif and typeface of the traditional books Arian Grqi.
