Russian/Cyrillic woes - Windows XP

[Mari Voipio <mari.voipio@iki.fi>]

Hello all!

I'm stuck: I have to get at least my ConTeXt to typeset Russian. No ifs 
or buts, it has to compile a file where the text is in Russian. Getting 
my ConTeXt to do it can involve installing a font or updating or 
something, as long as I get it to work in my XP.

Preferably I should need a fairly out-of-box to remotely set up a 
working system on a reasonably computer-literate customers XP.



All the computers than can be used for the job run Windows XP and the 
stand-alone distribution. My own XP has a fairly old distribution 
without Lua, the test computer has the newest possible standalone 
version with updated ConTeXt (I ran the script that seemed to do the trick).


Happened this far:

- I figured out that I can get SciTe to show cyrillics if I put a 
set.character=204 in the user.properties

- I deducted that I can get the updated ConTeXt to run MkIV 
"out-of-the-box" if I dig up the console and command texexec --lua filename

- on the up-to-date ConTeXt I've tried all the tricks I found for 
Russian on the garden (http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Russian) and on the 
mailing list (a thread from December last year). No luck.
(Note. Testing has mostly involved cutting and pasting the full example 
code into a blank .tex and compiling that into pdf in the way that's 
appropriate for the instructions.)



One of my problems seems to be that the input is not UTF, i.e. I have 
configured SciTe badly. Or Windows XP just doesn't like UTF, in which 
case I'm in trouble. It seems to me that if this problem is solved, MkIV 
would work. I'm not terribly used to working with encodings in general, 
so UTF is unknown terrain to me and this doesn't make things easier.

The other problem is that if I'm running MkII, it seems that I need to 
install some fonts, but typescripts seem to be of the "email me and you 
can get a typescript" way. Or then I just can't understand what the text 
says; since postscript started working by default a few years ago, I've 
avoided the font department altogether. :/

The third, and very minor problem, is to get the stand-alone to run 
MkIV/luatex by default. I'm sure there's a switch I can use to tell it 
to always use luatex instead of pdftex, I'm just too stupid to figure it 
out myself. And of course I'll only need this if MkIV is the best 
solution to my problem...



If that will solve the problem and if it can be done with minor changes 
(like adding something to path or something), I'm willing to switch to a 
different editor for Russian (or, rather, Cyrillic) - especially if that 
will happily coexist with SciTe.



Any hints on what to do next?


Mari

(Tip of the day: never promise anything to a customer before you've 
checked that it is doable in reality, not just in specs.)
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