Dear Michael Kolodin,

Wou wrote:

 > Guillemets are considered the main type of Russian quotes,
 > they are usually typed as <<text>> (as ligatures) or \<text\>
 > (as commands, more rarely), usually additional commands are
 > provided, but they are not that convenient,

This is officially true in France, but English has made serious
inroads with ``text''  in all areas but literature.
Incidentally  ,,text`` is I believe the official German
literary norm; the marks being called "little goose-feet".

(My preference goes to the Guillemets; they should be exported
to England and Germany ;=)

Thanks particularly for the warning that ,,text``
dominates ``text''

 > No other quotes (' ` >> << etc) are used.

How do you account for the presence of single Guillemets in
cp1251?

How do you account for the absence of ,,text`` from all of KOI8
and the presence of ``text''.  Culural osmosis?

cheers,

Larry


--- No theory is complete without a counterexample ---


PS.  I am privately and temporarily posting a few bitmaps of
Russian input encodings that I have found on the web. Try

 ftp://matups.math.u-psud.fr/pub/lcs/kolodin/