Accented Russian Fonts

[Yoshimasa Tsuji]

Dear C. E. Gribble,
Thank you for updating me with the latest capabilities of
WordPerfect.
 >I'm not sure what you mean by non-portable, but indeed the system WP uses
 >to denote non-ASCII characters is specific to WP.  On the other hand, it
 >works very well.  I have a completely customized Cyrillic keyboard in WP 7
 >(same principle to make one for 8 or 9) which has all the letters exactly
 >where I want them (e.g., asdf for the left hand, i kratkoe kl; for the
 >right in home row), plus all the vowels with both acute and grave accents,
 >plus all the characters for Macedonian, Serbian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and
 >OCS, including jat', jus malyj, jus bol'shoj, jotated letters, etc.  I can
 >also produce any other Slavic or Baltic letter, plus phonetics, etc. by the
 >press of a couple of keys.  WordPerfect is great for doing multilingual
 >text, especially linguistics.  It works on any Windows printer for all the
 >characters.  It does not, however, export the special characters to the
 >Web, any more than other word processors do.
 >
However, I don't think WP is of much practical use. Firstly, you will need
to save the foreign language text in its own Microsoft code page
before you can use a better utility, particularly a spell checker.
In the case of MS Word, I have found out that its accessory Russian spell
checker is much inferior to Orfo or Lingvo, so I naturally assume that
the accessory spell checker is no better or non-existent if the language
does not have a large number of computing users. When converted to
Microsoft's internal representation, all of the WP specific features
will be lost. If so, why WP? Perhaps, make a perfect text by MS Word,
and then add cosmetics by WP? MS Word can handle accented vowels, jus, etc.
if the font is provided. (If WP's fonts are in TTF format, MS Word
can use it.)
  Secondly, digital text is meant to be used more than once. If I
write a letter or a brief note without having a copy nor
a future reference, I will use a typewriter or handwrite it
because it's easier and quicker. When a digital text is re-used,
the new software needs to be compatible with the text to be used.
If the text is encoded in ASCII text only, there should be minimal
trouble (incidentally, my name is a single Japanese character
represented by two ASCII characters DT -- yes, Japanese standard
uses ASCII characters only). I am saying WordPerfect users will have
trouble if they began to use other software (Microsoft things,
Acrobat, Java, particularly). Even MS Word is not very safe:
the latest Russian version of Word does not accept a Russian text file
compiled in DOS days.
  I personally work in unix environment with a heavy reliance
upon Microsoft Windows and Mac. MS Windows application has a great
inventory (Ushakov/Dal' dictionaries, spell checkers, thesauruses, OCRs,
databases, etc.), Mac excels in dealing with PostScript printers
and DTP, but unix is the tool I develope my thinking -- it helps
me find relevant text, edit the text in the most idiosyncratic way,
etc. The linking node between those systems is a well documented
code conversion table that works with text files only.
  The point is not that WordPerfect is not much used, but rather that
it is not compatible with the standard. Incidentally, I am not
saying MS things are the standard though they can be made compatible
with the standard (ask MS Word to save in HTML/RTF/text format,
ask Excel to save in CSV format, etc.) without losing essential
information.

Cheers,
Tsuji