AlternativeCyrillicKeyboard

[Yoshimasa Tsuji]

Daf <daf at meirionnydd.force9.co.uk> wrote
 >
 >One way round this is to purchase OUP Rus -Eng dictionary on CD. In my
 >experience this is not without bugs but is nevertheless useful and
 >installing it also seems to install the Times New Roman Cyrillic font. I
 >then copied all the stressed vowels from character map and I insert them by
 >find and replace. It sounds [well, is] longwinded but it does work. Of
 >course anyone needing to read your documents has to have that font.
 >Daf  [web page-http://www.meirionnydd.force9.co.uk]
 >

The point is not whether or not one can input or print accented
vowels. The point is that AFII, the international organization
for the character encoding standard, has not taken up the
issue and left all those characters un-encoded. In plain words,
one cannot possibly convey that one wants to say 'accented o',
for example. Both UNICODE and PostScript encodings register
Thita, Jat', Tenth I, and Izhica, but not any of the
accented vowels of Russian.
  If you have a font editor (such as Fontgrapher) and a keyboard
driver editor (such as Janko's), you can implement accented vowels
in your system, but that will remain a purely PRIVATE system,
with no capability to data exchange with others.
  Incidentally, Thita, Jat' etc. are registered by PostScript,
have AFII numbers and are found in some commercially available
digital fonts, but neither Macintosh Cyrillic nor Microsoft Cyrillic
encoding defines the exact code numbers for them.
  It is time for an academic organization to define a standard
for character encoding, which is too important for private
software firms to cope with. (The transliteration system was
defined by the Library of Congress and National Geographical
Association -- I am not sure of the exact name --, why specialists
of Russian don't play its role?)

Cheers,
Tsuji


------
As you know, there are contexts where one cannot guess whether 'chto' means
'that' or 'what' without the aid of an accent sign.