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