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Date: Wed, 18 May 2011 00:46:03 +0200
From: Plamen Tanovski <pgt@tanovski.de>
To: Cyrillic TeX Users Group <CyrTeX-en@vsu.ru>
Subject: Re: Accented Cyrillic Vocals in Unicode
Message-ID: <20110517224603.GA4226@mail.tanovski.de>
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Hi, and thanks for the quick reply,

>  PT> The problem is, that there are no accented cyrillic vocals in
>  PT> unicode except for i and e with grave. Perhaps I don't need to
>  PT> mention, that accented vocals are urgently needed for homonymes and
>  PT> in textbooks.  So, I think, accented vocals should finally go into
>  PT> unicode. But I was told, that unicode doesn't provide slots for
>  PT> letters anymore, which can be made by the combination of other
>  PT> letters.
> 
> I see that this question was already discussed on the Unicode mailing
> list: there is a thread "Cyrillic - accented/acuted vowels" on
> 
> http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2005-m05/thread.html#2

Thanks for the link, I read the thread, but couldn't find any
reasonable answer.

>  PT> But using combinig diacritics in word processors is a big pain. In
>  PT> TeX putting accent is much easier, but it looks not always good,
>  PT> and the hyphenation doesn't work anymore.
> 
> As far as I see, current engines such as XeTeX and LuaTeX provide
> support for using Opentype fonts, which could have pre-composed cyrillic
> accented vowels. 

There are very few OpenType fonts, which include pre-composed cyr.
accented vowels (CAV). Maybe exactly because there are no unicode
slots for them. Anyway, most imortant is that to produce quality CAV
by combining characters, an OpenType font needs features, that are
complicated. The right accent glyph must be chosen, if the vowel is
upper or lowercase, and then the accent must be positioned on the
right place above the vowel. The features are called "contextual
alternatives" and "mark positioning". No type designer even bothers to
do this, since the latin counterparts are already precomposed in the
font. I've checked for example the free ParaType-Sans and didn't found
such features. So CAV will always look suboptimal because of the
combining. Searching and Replacing combined characters in a text
editor is also a big pain, because one have to mark the both
characters (accent and vowel).

>  PT> The T2* encodings don't have accented vocals as well, so I think we
>  PT> also need such encoding in TeX.
> 
> I feel that the 8-bit encodings are a thing of the past...

If so, than the accented kind of input writing like \` or \' is also
obsolete.

At least, we talk here about ca. 40 characters (including both greve
and acute variants). There must be some free slots in unicode. It will
make cyr. typesetting easier und better.

best regards 

Plamen Tanovski