🚀 go-pugleaf

Joe Dellinger said:
>In article <900919072...@lilac.berkeley.edu> DLV@CUNYVMS1.BITNET writes:
>>                     I've been playing with Russian hyphenation (indeed, my
>>MA thesis was about a very good Liang-based algorithm for doing just that),
>>and I've seen an algorithm (not mine:) that hyphenates, in particular,
>>AC-PU. :)
>
>        Speaking of which, does anybody have any decent Russian fonts? For the
>current version of TeX there are some Russian TeX meta-fonts, but they're
>not at all easy to use. In "old TeX" we used until recently there was a
>Cyrillic font that used ligatures to "automatically" pick up the right
>letters.  For example, "Khrushchev" came out 6 letters "KH-r-u-shch-e-v".

I'm sending a cc: of the response to the original newsgroup, as well as to
RusTeX-l and comp.text.tex --- sorry if this is of no interest to some.

I guess you mean to say that with the "old TeX" you used the MCYR fonts from
AMS. They used this elegant ligature scheme, but they had two problems: they
were written in the "old Metafont", so you couldn't generate your own
resolutions, and some letters didn't look so good.

AMS now distributes WNCYR fonts. The way they're distributed, they still use
the same ligatures as MCYR, so you can TeX your old files with no changes.
They look much better than MCYRs and include goodies like italics and small
caps (although some letters still look funny).

Another related TeX font is the CMCYR set developed by Alexander Samarin and
nana Gonti at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, USSR. It
includes only Russian letters (WMCYR has Ukrainain, Serbian, et al letters,
as well as yat', fita, and izhitsa), but they look better then WNCYR.

The problem with this cute ligature scheme is that it interferes with TeX's
hyphenation (what doesn't? :). If you want to have occasional Russian
citations in your texts, and want to load Russian hyphenation patterns for
them (remember, you can switch patterns with TeX 3.0), you have to do a
little obvious hacking so that instead of "Khrushchev" you'll be typing
"Hru{\shch}ev" (or "\Kh}ru{\shch}ev").

If you have large quantities of Russian text to type, you must get some
degree of WYSIWYGness so that you see Russian letters as you type them. Both
ligatures and \cs's are extremely tedious and error-prone for large
quantities of text.

There's a mailing list RusTeX-L used for discussing Russian TeX (I'm its
"administrator"). It's on LISTSERV@UBVM.BITNET. (Note that it's not
necessary to be on BITNET to use LISTSERV---just e-mail it "HELP").

>We have some contacts with Russian Geophysicists, and it's good PR when you're
>trying to help them convince the Soviet Gov't to let you traipse around taking
>rock samples in Siberia to annotate your tectonic maps of Siberia-Alaska in
>Russian!

Hey! If you want to really impress your Soviet geophysics friends, download
all the files, set up a Russified TeX (I highly recommend Eberhard Mattes'
free emTeX for MS-DOS) and give them a copy. :)

I hope this helps,
Dimitri Vulis
CUNY GC Math