Adding accents to Cyrillic text

[Richard Robin]

One way of doing Cyrillic accents in WINWORD (for the technically
adventurous!)

One way of doing "seamless" accents is to havbe a special font that matches
your default Cyrillic font. The special font consists only of accented
Russian vowels - all of which are assigned the same unicodes as the
unaccented vowels. For example,

'Moscovite' москвич becomes <times new roman>Москв<times new roman
accented>и<times new roman>ч.

Why is this 'seamless'? Because any Russian spellchecker now accepts
accented words. For example,

'Moscovite' spelled москви'ч, where the accent mark is then positioned over
the и (i) by the Word formula field is perceived as a misspelling because
the accent mark is read as an additional character. But spellcheckers
discard font information. As long as the accented vowel and the unaccented
vowel occupy the same unicode, the spellchecker reads the word correctly.

To make this work effectively, you have to come up with a macro allows you
stick in the accent with a simple keystroke combination. You also need the
accented fonts. I am willing to provide both.

Here's the Word (Windows) macro:

Sub VremyaAccent()
    Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
    Selection.Font.Name = "VremyaAccent"
    Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
    Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdWord, Count:=1
End Sub

It requires VremyaAccent fonts (regular, bold, italic, and bolditalic)

You can find them at these locations:
http://www.gwu.edu/~slavic/gw-cyrillic/vremy1.ttf
http://www.gwu.edu/~slavic/gw-cyrillic/vremy2.ttf
http://www.gwu.edu/~slavic/gw-cyrillic/vremy3.ttf
http://www.gwu.edu/~slavic/gw-cyrillic/vremy4.ttf

For each link, right-click and save as. Then add them to your font
collection.

To active the macro, copy it. Then in Word, Tools => Macro => Macros =>
Create
Past the macro. You might end up with "double "sub" and "end sub" lines:
if so,

Sub()  <=====Delete this line!
Sub VremyaAccent()
    Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
    Selection.Font.Name = "VremyaAccent"
    Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
    Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdWord, Count:=1
End Sub
End Sub <=======Delete this line.

Now, make a shortcut key for the macro (Tools => Customize => Keyboard). (I
use the hotkey Ctrl+q)

You're now ready! After you have typed a text, place the cursor immediately
after the vowel in question and hit the shortcut key. An accent will appear
over the vowel in question.

Warning: the accented vowel will look ugly on the screen (too bold and a bit
uneven). But it prints out perfectly. And best of all, your Russian
spellchecker will accept it.

-Rich






----- Original Message -----
From: "Ralph Cleminson" <ralph.cleminson at PORT.AC.UK>
To: <SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2002 8:54 AM
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Adding accents to Cyrillic text



Unicode does not include accented cyrillic, nor is it ever
likely to, since the current thinking at the Unicode
Consortium is not to encode as a character anything that
can be decomposed into other characters.  This would
include such examples as "cyrillic small letter a" plus
"combining acute accent" (i.e. UTF-1072  + UTF-0301).

To display accented characters in Unicode, therefore, one
simply adds the accent after the character, as in the
following example:

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