MSWord accented Cyrillic text

[David E. Crawford]

--- On 28 Oct 2000, at 0:03, Automatic digest processor wrote:  ---

> Date:    Fri, 27 Oct 2000 17:03:07 +0300
> From:    Alexandre Bougakov <bougakov at MAIL.RU>
> Subject: Re: MSWord accented Cyrillic text
>
...
>
> And how do you insert Cyrillic 'u', 'jy' and 'ja' with accents?

Hi Alexander et al.,

The procedure I described does not insert/substitute an existing
accented vowel character into the text in response to a combination
of keystrokes like some procedures do (e.g. the "Bill's Gate" Western
keyboard driver).  Rather, the combining acute accent, like all the
combining diactrics, is an individual character unto itself that
overstrikes the preceding typed character.  When you type in a
"normal" text character, the cursor advances to the right before
printing the character, but by design there is no such cursor advance
for "combining" characters.  The purpose of the combining diactrical
character set (UNICODE 0x0300-036F, see URL
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0300.pdf ) is to give the user the
ability to modify any arbitrary text character with an arbitrary
diacritic by way of the overstrike.  So, it doesn't matter what
character you typed immediately prior, the combining accent will be
printed directly above it.  Unfortunately, the Microsoft fonts
support only a small subset of the combining diacritics just now.

Also, to clarify, the previously-mentioned SIL IPA font doesn't
include Cyrillic characters.  When I compose accented text, I use the
Cyrillic fonts I would normally use (such as Times New Roman).  To
generate the accented character I stay in this font to type the
character, switch to the IPA font, insert the combining accent, then
switch back to my original font and continue.  It sounds more
complicated than it really is, since one hot-keystroke accomplishes
the entire operation.

> The obvious solution was to go to the Microsoft's website. I did it -
> and I have found the wonderful page called Office Extensions -
> http://www.microsoft.ru/offext/ and downloaded very small script
> called Stress97. It can insert accent above _any_ character - even
> Korean or Chinese.
>
> Get it from http://www.microsoft.ru/offext/getfile.asp?id=32
> (18 kilobytes) It's free.

I downloaded and ran the installation script here but unfortunately
the macros wouldn't install for reasons I haven't taken the time to
determine yet (probably security settings).  With the combining
diacritics available it isn't really needed.

>
> By the way, there are lots of other scripts and even big applications
> designed for MS Office family. All of them are very interesting and
> useful.

A good tip.  Thanks, will check it out!

Regards,
David

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Visit the Cyrillic for Windows 98 web page:
http://www.qsl.net/kd4whz/russian
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David E. Crawford
Titusville, Florida
United States of America
28.5144N 80.8417W
dec1 at cfl.rr.com
FAX/voicemail:   530-504-9257
ICQ:             2588570
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