Dear Colleagues,

    This is just to inform/remind you that a beta
version of the ASCII-Cyrillic package for typing
Cyrillic in any ASCII environment is on CTAN in the
tex-archive/language/ directory.  The CTAN presentation
notice is attached.

    In the interim, I have merely spotted a few
glitches in the documentation.  Notably:

In various places in the documentation the  c  in
ASCII-Cyrillic is used for the letter  '{ch}
(pronounced ch).  It was ultimately decided that  c
should represent  '{c} (pronounced ts). This applies to
both Russian and Ukrainian.

    You can always get the most up-to-date version
at

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

Cheers

Laurent S (in Paris)

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Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 08:50:30 +0100
From: Reinhard Zierke <zierke@Dante.DE>
To: ctan-ann@urz.uni-heidelberg.de
Subject: CTAN submission -- ascii-cyrillic
Message-ID: <20010207085030.A3460@sun2.dante.de>
Reply-To: ctan@Dante.DE
Content-Disposition: inline

----- Forwarded message from Laurent Siebenmann -----
"ascii-cyrillic.zip" is a zipped directory uploaded to the
ftp.dante.de incoming directory on 6 Feb.

I recommend it be unzipped to become a subdiecctory
 "ascii-cyrillic" of

   tex-archive/language/

where most analogous stuff is found, notably the
directory "cyrillic" that presents Barbara
Beeton's system for exploiting the AMS WNCY 7-bit
encoded Cyrillic font system.

...

IN BRIEF:

"ASCII-Cyrillic" is a new system for dealing precisely
with Cyrillic languages using no more than an ASCII
keyboard and an ASCII screen font.

LICENCE: GPL

ANNOUNCEMENT:

The ASCII-Cyrillic system currently serves modern
Russian and Ukrainian in parallel and provides a
perfectly faithful (7-bit) ASCII representation for
any 8-bit Cyrillic text file.  Such a text file has
one of many 8-bit encodings, but its ASCII-Cyrillic
representation is entirely encoding-independent. It
is also reasonably readable, and reasonably
convenient to type.  For Russian, the 33 letters
of the alphabet are typed:

     a b v g d e 'o 'z z i j k l m n o p r
     s t u f x 't 'c 'w 'w q y h 'e 'u 'a    

Latin 'words' are represented with prefix "!"; for
example, Coca-Cola becomes!Coca-!Cola in
ASCII-Cyrillic. A TeX control sequence like \begin
is unchanged, as are most ASCII diacritics.

ASCII-Cyrillic is logically independent of TeX, its
fonts, and font encodings. On the other hand, it can
be used more or less as an extension of the ASCII TeX
language allowing a convenient ASCII representation
of Cyrillic in the same sense that TeX has always
provided a convenient ASCII representation of
mathematics.

The conversion both ways between 8-bit Cyrillic text
(with any encoding) and ASCII-Cyrillic is
accomplished by a TeX utility called "email-ru.tex".
(As the name suggests, it can be exploited to email
Cyrillic 8-bit typing as ASCII-Cyrillic, assuring it
is undamaged by even the the most cranky email
facilities.)

Direct composition by Knuth's TeX of ASCII-Cyrillic
text to yield Cyrillic print is not possible (but it
could be done by eTeX of the NTS project).  One has to
use "email-ru.tex" as a preprocessor to TeX.  This will
become more convenient in future versions.

ASCII-Cyrillic reached alpha status in September 2000
and is now 'beta'.
----- End forwarded message -----

Thanks for the upload.  I installed the files in
CTAN:/tex-archive/language/ascii-cyrillic as suggested.

Reinhard Zierke
for the CTAN team

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