Dear Colleagues,

For the New Year (Russian Style) I am moving
ASCII-Cyrillic from "alpha" status to "beta" status.
The "home" site is:

http://topo.math.u-psud.fr/~lcs/ASCII-Cyrillic/ascii-cy.htm

Some convenience features are partly new:

 -- the HTML intrductory web page  "ascii-cy.htm"

 -- a PDF translation "ascii-cy_B5.pdf" designed
chiefly for comfortable screen reading.

These two are a highly desirable complement to the text
documentation (found at the end of email-ru.tex). The
latter is more detailed but requires a cp1251 screen
font for the cyrillic glyphs.  The HTML and PDF versions
will be universally readable as they instead use bitmaps
for the cyrillic glyphs.

There is a technical problem outside of Russia that I am
still working on.  A stubborn minority of teX
implementations are unable to \write octets in the range
128--256, but instead \write ^^xy where xy is the
lowercase hexadecimal representation of the octet. It
seems to me that only the direct decendants of C TeX are
involved. On the other hand, this behavior is certainly
orthodox Knuthian TeX and must be handled with due
respect.

Since this behavior blocks half the action of
email-ru.tex, namely the conversion from ASCII-Cyrillic
to 8-bit Cyrillic text, I have launched a tiny utility
"Kto8" utility that converts TeX output with
"pseudo-octets" ^^xy into genuine 8-bit text.  Porting
is the only problem. You are more than welcome to make a
contribution for any platform.  For my part, I have
posted a Macintosh version at:

   http://topo.math.u-psud.fr/~lcs/Kto8/

which has by now moved to CTAN:

          tex-archive/systems/mac/Kto8



All the best for 2001,

Laurent Siebenmann