Return-Path: Received: from video.uic.vsu.ru ([62.76.169.38] verified) by vsu.ru (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 3.3.1) with ESMTP id 1844811 for CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru; Fri, 01 Sep 2000 10:15:51 +0400 Sender: vvv@video.uic.vsu.ru From: Laurent Siebenmann To: CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru Subject: Re: ASCII-Cyrillic Date: 01 Sep 2000 10:15:38 +0400 Message-ID: Lines: 59 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.6 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Dear Barbara, You write: << i was constrained to use the mathematical reviews transliteration, with two distinct outputs required... >> Being no longer constrained since TeX 3 of 1989 is the basic incentive to devise a more comfortable scheme. But I was slow to start and slower to conclude that the problem should be addressed in a manner that makes it useful beyond TeX. Students of Russian are often hampered by the lack of a Russian keyboard. And visitors from Russia to the West find themselves in the same embarrassment. These are substantial populations of casual users that could be served by ASCII-Cyrillic syntax. I fear that if one intersects this population with avid users of TeX for mathematics, then the target population falls dangerously close to zero. Probably that means that one should code my conversions not just as TeX scripts, but as CGI scripts available on the net, as Java, as perl, as emacs-lisp, ... << most people ... are not aware of the \cydot command that is required to separate the two distinct letters "t.s" as opposed to the single letter "ts".>> This is a basic sticking point in the use of ligatures to reach exotic letters like "ts". Could anyone explain with what systematic syntax Omega proposes to resolve this sticking point -- and in great generality? <<..there is an alternate input encoding for wncy*, with some letters consisting of a letter plus a digit...>> Interesting. Could we have a simplest example? << if cyrillic fonts are needed for publication in russian or other slavic languages (or even in non-slavic languages represented in cyrillic), there are now much better alternatives -- created by specialists who speak and use those languages daily -- and i advise that these new fonts and encodings be used instead of the quite limited wncy*. >> I am sure we all agree. ASCII-Cyrillic was devised to let me use these perfected 8-bit systems even when hampered by lack of a Russian keyboard. Cheers Larry