Accented Russian Fonts

[Yoshimasa Tsuji]

Robert Orr said,
  The WordPerfect charcater sets include Cyrillic vowels with both acute and
  grave accents, and if your printer supports them, you should have no trouble
  (although the instructions for setting up a keyboard are slightly
  obscurantist!)

WordPerfect was notoriously non-portable (at least five years ago
when it needed a Cyrillic module). I don't know how it works
under Corel, which I assume its present name.

Anyway, there is no consensus about how stress signs can be laid
on Russian vowels. There's nothing you can do about this.

G. E. Thobe has recently enlightened me by referring to a UNICODE
documentation
    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

Well, UNICODE may have defined a category of diacritical marks
that doesn't move the reference point forward (like an acute
accent on your typewriter which when hit prints an acute but
the paper stays)*, I am not too sure if UNICODE is seriously
implemented at all (Microsoft uses it, Emacs and TeX have UNICODE
versions, but to what serious extent? I haven't heard of any serious
PostScript fonts or PostScript printer based on UNICODE.)

TeX's mechanism allows you to properly place stress signs on vowels
(especially on capital letters!!), but TeX doesn't seem to be
particularly popular outside science.

The easiest solution is to put stress signs before the
characters like
     Ja `ekhal iz Tifl`isa. Ves' moj bag`azh sosto`jal iz odnog`o
   nebol'sh`ogo chemod`ana, kot`oryj do polov`iny byl nap`olnen
   putev`ymi zap`iskami o Gr`uzii.

As placing stress signs above vowels is not an easy task (in spite of
the Unicode recommendation), particularly when the vowel itself is
a rather complicated drawing, wise people have put the stress marks
before the stressed syllables (See IPA's phonetic representation).
You should teach students that stress marks are not put on the vowels,
but before the syllables concerned rather than implement a non-portable,
private hack.

Cheers,
Tsuji

-----
* A keyboard of mine has a COMPOSE key that allows you to
input an accented vowel (it is Sun's).

** stress signs before syllables
     Ja `ekhal iz Tif`lisa. Ves' moj ba`gazh sosto`jal iz odno`go
   nebol'`shogo chemo`dana, ko`toryj do polo`viny byl na`polnen
   pute`vymi za`piskami o `Gruzii.

Yes, I have noticed that Russians always write accents right above
the vowels. That's a bit strange...