Dear Vladimir,

Thanks for an excellent rundown on the current situation
on russification methods.  On the balance I would agree
that the active character approach has the best
performance.  Which does not imply that the other
approaches are *never* preferable!

You have just created an admirably complete set of WL
fonts (vf and tm versions), in analogy with the WLCY font
demo posted by the AmS several years
ago.  Everyone seems to be agreed that this is a
simplest way to get correct kerning and hyphenation from
the WNCY fonts and equally from the WN fonts.

You ask:

 >  LS> 1) Is there a version of the "WN" without the poisonous
 >  LS> ligatures. Maybe "WL" fonts?

 > i just created such virtual fonts which refer to WN fonts but do not
 > have "false" ligatures, and sent them to you in a separate letter. Are
 > these WL fonts important enough to have them officially supported?


I do think the effort is important enough to have
WL and WLCY fonts officially supported ---
basically because it is extremely simple and gives
impeccable results.

Let me elaborate a bit on this. The WNCY fonts have
the advantage of being present in virtually every TeX
system worldwide, and even in Type 1 format on many
Windows and all Macintosh micros.

The average TeX user is given to understand that the WNCY
fonts are adequate for -- at very least -- bibliographic
references to the Russian literature made in English
language articles. This is true for the WLCY fonts. But,
as has we now fully understand, the WNCY unavoidably have
glaring deficiencies of kerning and hyphenation.

Some say that this does not matter for references and
short quotations. This is nonsense where hypnenation is
concerned!  Indeed:

(a) Knuth's global hyphenation algorithm for a paragraph
makes hyphenation at first and second lines *far* more
probable that at later lines.

(b) Non-russian users are incompetent to do hypnenation
by hand.


What applies to WNCY (and WLCY) applies to WN (and WL).
The WN (or WL) russian fonts have the same aims, but
happily are more complete and better in style.  So, where
the WNCY fonts are not available in suitable faces, the WN
fonts can step in gracefully without throwing the TeX user
into a situation where he is asked to relearn a lot to
improve his typography --- perhaps just marginally.

I admit that this argument is one that applies best
outside Russia.  But it probably applies to quite a few
Russians when they are abroad or even writing in English
when in Russia.

       Cheers

           Larry Siebenmann