Accented Russian fonts on the web

[Jeanette Owen]

Dear Seelangers:
At present, none of the standard encoding schemes for Cyrillic support
accent marks.  Thus far Unicode hasn't provided accented Cyrillic
characters, either.
On a cheerier note, it is possible to outsmart web browsers by streaming
fonts to the browser off of the server (also known as "burning" fonts, or
dynamic fonts).  So far this plan still requires some jiggling around of
true-type Mac-based accented Cyrillic fonts to get it to work for both PC
and Mac browsers.
I have to confess I didn't have time to continue work in this vein, so I
saved my accented texts as graphics and went from there.  I am hoping to
find a solution in the future...
Try checking  http://www.hexmac.com  for further information on dynamic fonts.
Best of luck,
Jeanette

 Hopefully the company supplying the streaming font program will come up
with a solution.  (It works fine for Tibetan fonts). I finally had to
settle for saving texts with accent marks as graphics.

>
>I am attempting to put some Russian text on the web, and would like to
>include accent marks for students.  Does anybody know of a Cyrillic font
>that includes accented vowels?  Many thanks for any help you can provide.
>
>Sincerely,
>
>Jonathan White
>
>
>
>
>-----------------------
>Jonathan White
>Trinity College #701444
>300 Summit St.
>Hartford, CT  06106
>edmokeski at hotmail.com
>-----------------------
>
>
>_______________________________________________________________
>Get Free Email and Do More On The Web. Visit http://www.msn.com
>Date:    Wed, 28 Jul 1999 17:30:52 -0400
>From:    Danko Sipka <sipkadan at erols.com>
>Subject: Re: Accented Russian Fonts
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
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>
>> I am attempting to put some Russian text on the web, and would like to
>> include accent marks for students.  Does anybody know of a Cyrillic font
>> that includes accented vowels?  Many thanks for any help you can provide.
>
>You can always create your own or modify an existing font using say
>Fontographer (which is available on both Mac and PC platform). However, if
>you want your students to see these signs, they will have to have that font
>installed on their computers. An alternative solution would be to use the
>Summer Institute of Linguistic font and its dead accent keys (you can pick up
>the font at: www.sil.org). Again, you will have to distribute this font to
>your students.
>
>Best,
>
>
>Danko Sipka
>Date:    Thu, 29 Jul 1999 00:11:50 +0200
>From:    Kjetil Ra Hauge <K.R.Hauge at easteur-orient.uio.no>
>Subject: Re: Accented Russian Fonts
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>>> I am attempting to put some Russian text on the web, and would like to
>>> include accent marks for students.  Does anybody know of a Cyrillic font
>>> that includes accented vowels?  Many thanks for any help you can provide.
>>
>>You can always create your own or modify an existing font using say
>>Fontographer (which is available on both Mac and PC platform). However, if
>>you want your students to see these signs, they will have to have that font
>>installed on their computers.
>
>Internet Explorer apparently suppports downloadable fonts, but the downside
>is that the page will only be viewable in MSIE, and you will also have to
>resolve issues of copyright. Unicode won't cut it either, it does not
>include accented vowels for Cyrillic. I suggest either bolding accented
>vowels or putting stress accents in front of them.
>
>-- Kjetil Re Hauge, U. of Oslo. Phone +47/22856710, fax +47/22854140
>-- (this msg sent from home, ph. +47/67148424, fax +1/5084372444 [eFax,
U.S.])
>Date:    Thu, 29 Jul 1999 21:04:51 -0400
>From:    Robert Orr <colkitto at sprint.ca>
>Subject: Re: Accented Russian Fonts
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>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!)
>
>Robert Orr
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Kjetil Ra Hauge <K.R.Hauge at easteur-orient.uio.no>
>To: SEELANGS at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU <SEELANGS at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
>Date: Wednesday, July 28, 1999 6:08 PM
>Subject: Re: Accented Russian Fonts
>
>
>>> I am attempting to put some Russian text on the web, and would like to
>>> include accent marks for students.  Does anybody know of a Cyrillic font
>>> that includes accented vowels?  Many thanks for any help you can provide.
>>
>>You can always create your own or modify an existing font using say
>>Fontographer (which is available on both Mac and PC platform). However, if
>>you want your students to see these signs, they will have to have that font
>>installed on their computers.
>
>Internet Explorer apparently suppports downloadable fonts, but the downside
>is that the page will only be viewable in MSIE, and you will also have to
>resolve issues of copyright. Unicode won't cut it either, it does not
>include accented vowels for Cyrillic. I suggest either bolding accented
>vowels or putting stress accents in front of them.
>
>-- Kjetil Re Hauge, U. of Oslo. Phone +47/22856710, fax +47/22854140
>-- (this msg sent from home, ph. +47/67148424, fax +1/5084372444 [eFax,
>U.S.])
>Date:    Thu, 29 Jul 1999 11:27:36 +0900
>From:    Yoshimasa Tsuji <yamato at yt.cache.waseda.ac.jp>
>Subject: Re: Accented Russian Fonts
>
>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...
>