Re: Does ConTeXt really support russian language?

["Mojca Miklavec" <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 4:34 PM, Andrey Riabushenko wrote:
> I have spend three days trying to make ConTeXt show Cyrillic letters with zero
> success.
> I have tried to follow  http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Russian precisely still
> I see only latin transliteration instead of Cyrillic letters.

I admit that those instructions are confusing.

There are two completely different ways to use Cyrillic.

1.) Using LuaTeX or XeTeX
2.) Using pdfTeX


> The funny thing that http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Vietnamese gives absolutely
> different set of commands for internationalization. I have tried them as well
> with no luck.
>
> I have tried about 10 variants that I have found on wiki.contextgarden.net and
> ntg-context@ntg.nl maillist NONE of them produce russian letters just latin
> transliteration and empty text.
>
> I have tried so far:
> Fresh install of TeX Live 2008 on Windows XP
> Fresh install of TeTeX 3 on FreeBSD 7

(That's not the best choice.)

> Fresh install of Latest Context Minimals on FreeBSD 7 (installed on
> 22-12-2008)

ConTeXt minimals contains the following fonts with cyrillic glyphs:
- TeX Gyre, but the quality of Cyrillic is not optimal (the guys need
some expert in Cyrillic to fix fonts)
- Gentium
- Antykwa Torunska
- Iwona & Kurier
with support for Cyrillic.

They don't contain the cm-super fonts (and that's important
information). TeX Live 2008 contains cm-super fonts as well.

You first need to tell us what font you want to use and which engine.

For pdfTeX you need:

\enableregime[utf-8] % (but maybe only \enableregime[utf] works at the
moment due to some bug)
\mainlanguage[ru] % or [russian]
\usetypescript[name][t2a]
\setupbodyfont[name]

Where name could be one of the allowed fonts from the set above. Try
the following (with texexec):

\enableregime[utf]
\mainlanguage[ru]
\usetypescript[antykwa-torunska][t2a]
\setupbodyfont[antykwa]

\starttext
Немного русского текста для пробы.
\stoptext

or this (with "texexec --xtx" or "context"):

\mainlanguage[ru]
\usetypescript[antykwa-torunska]
\setupbodyfont[antykwa]

\starttext
Немного русского текста для пробы.
\stoptext

just to make sure that it works.

After that, you need to tell what font you want to use and what engine
you want to use.

pdfTeX's handling of Cyrillic is kind-of-a-hack. XeTeX and LuaTeX
handle UTF-8 natively, but esp. LuaTeX is still a tiny bit
experimental (which means that you should not rely on its functionaliy
on critical documents), but much more powerful.

> LaTeX, from the same installations of TeXlive 2008 and teTeX,  works out box,
> just as simple as:
> \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

The same command in ConTeXt reads
   \enableregime[utf-8]

> \usepackage[T2A]{fontenc}

The equivalent in ConTeXt is to add [t2a] in the \usetypescript line,
but only when you work with pdfTeX. With XeTeX and LuaTeX this hack
becomes obsolete.

Note that this gives you cm-super fonts, but those are only available
in TeX Live, not in the minimals.

This is supposed to work. It's a bug that it doesn't:

Variant 1:
\definetypeface [russian] [rm] [serif] [computer-modern] [default]
[encoding=t2a]
\setupbodyfont [russian]

Variant 2:
\usetypescript[modern-base][t2a] % Hans - why only modern-base?
\setupbodyfont[modern]

I could provide you a patch for any given font but Computer Modern. Taco?

Mojca
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