AlternativeCyrillicKeyboard

[Yoshimasa Tsuji]

Dear Professor Busch,
  I am flattered to know that I can ever be of any use to you, Professor
Busch. Well, there are many Cyrillic keyboard drivers around, and I have been
tempted to simply let you know one of them, but I have decided that
the best thing to do is to let you the job yourself. I am saying so
because in my view you should establish the best compatibility with
your MacIntosh system with which I am least familiar.

If you search around the internet with the keyword "Janko's keyboard
generator", you will probably find
   http://solair.eunet.yu/~janko/e95downl.htm

Install the program, make sure you have installed at least one
Windows95/98 Cyrillic font, and run it. Now select the font
and put characters on the keys, save the keyboard driver,
install it.  That's it.

Now, the real reason I answer you in public is not that
I want to force the public to create their own keyboard drivers,
but that I wish to convey my thoughts on the Russian fonts and
keyboard layouts.

The current Cyrillic fonts do cover non-Russian characters but
do lack some of the most important ones: the o with the stress
sign is indispensable (big or bigger?). Classroom
handout needs to have all the stress positions clearly marked,
if you teach Russian abroad.
 Moreover, if you are a specialist of pre-1918 history/literature,
you may wish to use jat' or i. In fact, an American firm sells
a keyboard thing ("naklejka" in Russian, what was it in English?
I forgot) that contains I, TH, and ^E (the ^ should have been
a v like diacritical mark as it is a narrow e). Some of the
font manufacturers actually sell Russian fonts with these oldish
characters, but none sell accented vowels for classroom use.
I don't need accented vowels as I don't teach Russian, but I
definitely need to use `o. So I had to create my own fonts and
keyboard driver, and I think perhaps you do, too.


Zhelaju Vam vsego, vsego khoroshego.
With best wishes,

Tsuji

---------
My own keyboard layout is ---note that uppercase comes first ---

 TH is on |\ key

 1 No is on !1
 2- is on @2
 3/ is on #3
 4" is on $4
 5: is on %5
 6, is on ^6
 7. is on &7
 8-- is on *8  (tire)
 9? is on (9
 0% is on )0
 I  is on _-
 ^E is on +=

 I kratokoe, C, U, K, E, N, G, Sh, Shch, Z, KH, hard sign

 F, Y, V, A, P, R, O, L, D, ZH, revE,
 closing guillemet, opening guillemet on ~`

 Ja, Ch, S, M, I, T, soft sign, B, Ju, Jo
--- `o is printed by a TeX macro \`o as I use TeX rather than Microsoft
things ---

The keyboard layout of mine is not pre-1918, it is Soviet traditional
plus a few additions. I did so because I had been using Russian typewriters
more than ten years before I began using a computer with a Cyrillic
keyboard. At that time one wrote in Russian like in German, the same
way as Morse code or Braille code.