Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2002 01:05:42 +0100 (WEST)
From: Laurent Siebenmann <sieben@cristal.math.u-psud.fr>
Message-Id: <200206130005.g5D05gx04403@beryl.math.u-psud.fr>
To: CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru
Subject: Re: Russian/Polish/German...without switching


Hi Vladimir,

 LS> Omega users (using their near infinite 256^2
 LS> capacity) can stack German Russian and Polish (disjointly) 
 LS> into one vf encoding and one hyphenation scheme.  This 
 LS> involves something less rigid than basic unicode.

Stacking was to be "disjoint" so the "sharing" of letters
by Polish and German is a red herring.  The stacked languages would
normally be displayed in an editor with some obvious visible
distinction (say color) so a German A and a Polish A look different.
In this way Omega suppresses  a lot of TeX complexities ---
which is exactly what Ruprecht wanted.

Vladimir says that this approach works "more-or-less" with
stacked Russian and English.  What are its worst faults?  This
system is *in use* so users should be warned early and often
of any significant failings. 

Watever its virtues or failings, a sufficiently flexible input 
system to exploit worldwide this variant of Omega typesetting is 
not known to me. I don't yet use Omega, but I occasionally wonder
why/how I might some day.

Cheers

Laurent S.


PS. Could someone please point out an URL for the emacs
Cyrillic kit (for linux and win98)?  Likewise for its UTF8
apparatus.  (I didn't notice them in my 2002 download of emacs.)