Laurent wrote:
....
> -- Obtain from me a single "West_European_and_Russian"
>8-bit Mac screen font and drop it on your Mac System
>folder.

Feel free to send it to me or show me from were I can downlod it :-)

> -- Obtain from me a single "Norwegian-Russian" KCHR
>keyboard resource and drop it on the Mac System file. You
>or I would have to build it on analogy with my
>"French-Russian" KCHR resource (not difficult using the
>ResEdit a tool delivered with most Mac systems).

I would like to do this also. Perhaps if you send me your french-russian keyboard I can see what must be done? I have used ResEdit a little.

> -- Input (into TeX before typesetting) a table telling
>TeX how to interpret the characters >128 in the
>"West_European_and_Russian" 8-bit screen font.

I assume you have this table also? ;-)

In fact, the ParaType (russian) font company sells Russian-Finnish fonts/keyboards. It is a very smart thing, so that one can use the same font for both russian and finnish. But the norwegian æøå is not in the finnish alphabet so...

>At this point the language switching reduces to
>
>  (c)  type a language switch macro
>  (e)  hit the Shift-Lock key

The problem with this is that the Shift-Lock key is not programmable. One could think that it must be possible to design the KCHR so that one can have one version that belongs to cyrillic script (as understood by MacOS) and one that belong to Latin script. That way one could switch between the two keyboards via the 'Flag-menu', or with Command + Space (which is the short cut to switch between writing systems on the Mac). If you made the keyboard like this (you would have to make two keybaords), on could make macros that performed languages switch and keyboard switch at the sime time.

>You have to use a new way to type Russian on ASCII
>keyboards, one that I consider superior to any other ---
>perhaps because I concocted it myself but perhaps because
>it has more internal coherence than rivals I have seen.
>
>To get the 33 letters of the Russian alphabet one types
>respectively:
>
>     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    

Ok, this reminds me about using Cyrillic QWERTY KCHR for typing (8-bit) russian with Cyrillic Language kit.

>The Russian Cyrillic letters \cyra, \cyrb, \cyrv, ... ,
>\cyrya appear on the screen.

Cyrillic letter? This is TeX/LaTeX ascii representations... I suppose I will see the real letters on screen (referring to what you write below)?

>  The eight "doublets" 'o 'z 't
>'c 'e 'u 'a  each produce *one* Cyrillic character via the
>Mac's official "dead-key" mechanism --- which all West
>Europeans employ in typing some or all accented characters;
>the "Norwegian-Russian" KCHR resource configures this
>mechanism.

Interesting.

>Those of you who followed my postings in year 2000
>will recognize some of the conventions that I call
>ASCII-Cyrillic -- it's a scheme for faithfully
>representing Russian in ASCII; but you need not
>care about that here; the above is rather for efficient
>8-bit typing of mixed Cyrillic&Latin text with
>Cyrillic&Latin characters appearing on screen.

So we see the cyrillic letters as real cyrillic letters instead of \cyra? (Same question as above.)

>There remains a technical problem: how should one communicate
>such typescripts between russists using differents sort of
>computer.  One good answer is obvious:- by conversion using TeX
>to (and from) to the UTF8 encoding.  The conversion
>
>  "West_European_and_Russian" ==> UTF8
>
>can be supplied by CV a converter by me and Bernd Raichle,
>modulo (addition of one more encoding table).  The reverse
>will require some revision of CV.

You may as well send me this also. Though I have a slight feeling I would prefer the the Cyrillic QWERTY-(or if you wish: "two-physical-keyboards") method.

--
leif