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Subject:
From:
Vladimir Volovich <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sat, 14 Jun 1997 22:53:52 +0400
Content-Type:
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Werner Lemberg wrote:

> Vladimir, have you looked at the T2 proposal for Russian (look at
> http://www.iai.rssi.ru/berd/table)?

Yes. We are now discussing this in RU.TeX newsgroup (it's a
russian FidoNet newsgrop). :-)

> They use the default \lccode and
> \uccode layout. It will not solve all problems with languages using
> the Cyrillic script (and extensions of it), but at least you can avoid bad
> hyphenation.

Yes, the T2-encodins seems to be perspective, but...
The problem is that this proposed encoding does not correspond to
the currently widely used (in TeX documents) Russian encodings.
The most popular encoding used in russian TeX documents is currently a
DOS cp866, because the most popular Russian fonts (LH fonts and
fonts developed by P.V.Ganelin and A.Shen) use this encoding.

And this code page (cp866) is `incompatible' (in sence of lccode-uccode
values with T1 codepage). There are some workarounds that can be used:
e.g. whose who work with emTeX are able to use TeX Code Pages (TCP).
But TCP mechanism is currently emTeX-specific.

We also tried to use inputenc package, for example, to process
documents in a KOI-8 encoding. This works, but has some limitations.
E.g. when one uses inputenc, there is no possibility to use
the characters which are being translated as a names of macros,
because these characters become active. Also, there are some problems
with AUX files.

BTW, it is interesting to know the opinion of members of this list about the following:
not long ago Donald Knuth said that he is against any attempts
to change Computer Modern fonts (this happened in one of TeX distributions,
probably teTeX, where they changed CM fonts so, that metric files changed).
But one of the popular russian fonts for TeX are also based on the idea of
changing CM fonts: this fonts replace some files in such a way, that
the resulting fonts are called cm*, but they contain also all russian letters.
These fonts do not change anything which corresponds to the original letters
contained in CM fonts.

Is this approach legal?

--
With best regards,
                   Vladimir.

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