Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 02:50:57 GMT
Message-Id: <200110300250.f9U2ovv05705@beryl.math.u-psud.fr>
From: sieben@cristal.math.u-psud.fr
To: CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru, lcs@beryl.math.u-psud.fr
Subject: Typing Norwegian&Russian


Hi Lief and others,

Repeat warning. The following is mostly for Macintosh users.

Based on my own setup for using French concurrently with
Russian on a Macintosh computer, I can promise that the
following is possible for Norwegian&Russian.

 -- Obtain from me a single "West_European_and_Russian"
8-bit Mac screen font and drop it on your Mac System
folder.
 -- Obtain from me a single "Norwegian-Russian" KCHR
keyboard resource and drop it on the Mac System file. You
or I would have to build it on analogy with my
"French-Russian" KCHR resource (not difficult using the
ResEdit a tool delivered with most Mac systems).
 -- Input (into TeX before typesetting) a table telling
TeX how to interpret the characters >128 in the
"West_European_and_Russian" 8-bit screen font.

At this point the language switching reduces to

  (c)  type a language switch macro
  (e)  hit the Shift-Lock key

You have to use a new way to type Russian on ASCII 
keyboards, one that I consider superior to any other --- 
perhaps because I concocted it myself but perhaps because 
it has more internal coherence than rivals I have seen.

To get the 33 letters of the Russian alphabet one types
respectively:

     a b v g d e 'o 'z z i j k l m n o p r
     s t u f x 't 'c w 'w q y h 'e 'u 'a    

The Russian Cyrillic letters \cyra, \cyrb, \cyrv, ... , 
\cyrya appear on the screen.  The eight "doublets" 'o 'z 't 
'c 'e 'u 'a  each produce *one* Cyrillic character via the 
Mac's official "dead-key" mechanism --- which all West 
Europeans employ in typing some or all accented characters; 
the "Norwegian-Russian" KCHR resource configures this 
mechanism. 

Those of you who followed my postings in year 2000
will recognize some of the conventions that I call 
ASCII-Cyrillic -- it's a scheme for faithfully 
representing Russian in ASCII; but you need not 
care about that here; the above is rather for efficient
8-bit typing of mixed Cyrillic&Latin text with
Cyrillic&Latin characters appearing on screen.

There remains a technical problem: how should one communicate
such typescripts between russists using differents sort of
computer.  One good answer is obvious:- by conversion using TeX
to (and from) to the UTF8 encoding.  The conversion 

  "West_European_and_Russian" ==> UTF8

can be supplied by CV a converter by me and Bernd Raichle,
modulo (addition of one more encoding table).  The reverse
will require some revision of CV.

If anyone is interested in these unpublished tools
please pipe up! They apply with suitable variations to
every language with a Latin alphabet to be employed 
interlaced with Russian.

They apply to every TeX format and every adequate font system.

Do they apply to other OSs?  They did not back in 1987 when 
they first became possible for Macs.  But, in the interim, most 
OSs have become Mac look-alikes.  So the question
is now worth considering.


Cheers

Laurent Siebenmann