Re: Russia (cyrillic letters)

[h h extern <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Mikael Persson wrote:

> I am looking for a way of writing some home exercises in my Russian
> course in ConTeXt. However, so far I have not succeed with it. Should
> it work out of the box without installing any new fonts (I am having
> the fonts from a full install of TeXLive2003 now)? I have looked a bit
> in the source files for context, but with no luck.

well, i just took a look in the latest tex tree, and i cannot find a trace of 
the russian fonts that are defined in abundance in context's type-enc.tex; one 
problem with russian is that nobody seems to be responsible to get all the right 
stuff on tex live;

Based on the definitions, the following should work (and is reported to work):

\starttext

\definetypeface [latin]
   [rm] [serif] [latin-modern] [default] [encoding=texnansi]

\definetypeface [russian]
   [rm] [serif] [computer-modern] [default] [encoding=cyr] % t2a

\latin   \dostepwiserecurse{`a}{`z}{1}{\char\recurselevel} \endgraf
\russian \dostepwiserecurse{`a}{`z}{1}{\char\recurselevel} \endgraf

\stoptext

In order to get it working i suggest those using russian to do the following:

- determine what encodings are *really* in use
- collect the tfm/vf/pfb files that are needed to get that done
- build me the right map files

(i probably involves some fonts from cmsuper; so ... what is the reasonable 
subset that we need; if needed we can stick to a few reasonable sized (as we do 
with greek); it's mostly the math that is sensitive to design sizes)

we can then make a proper subset for (1) tex live and (2) the minimal context 
distribution; even better would be to have those glyohs needed to be added to 
the latin modern fonts [i can look into that later]

> I guess there are different ways to achieve this, however, since I
> also want some swedish text in the same documents, the best would
> probably be if one of the following options worked:

the simpliest is to switch font and language at the same time (but i cannot test 
anything if i have no fonts running on my sytstem]

> 1) Typing everything in utf8, and get the different languages
> automatically when compiling.

currently the utf handler does not change fonts, but since language switches are 
to be given anyway, it can be hooked into the language handler if needed

> 2) Typing everything with western letters, having some kind of
> \startrussia Boris \stoprussia and get Boris typeset with Cyrillic
> letters.

Just language+font switches using the typeface macros.

Hans

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