Problems with Russian font

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Benjamin Sher wrote:

> Dear friends:
>
> My wife is editing her Russian translation of a French novel. The
> original text was typed using the ER-Bukinist 1251 Cyrillic fonts in
> MSWord 6 about six years ago. I would appreciate your help with
> two problems:
>
> 1) When she tries to replace a character with the same or another
> character, the new character is smaller in size. Please see
> screenshots below:
>
> http://www.websher.net/temp/kto1.jpg
> http://www.websher.net/temp/kto2.jpg
>
> Look for the word "kto" on the third line of the first paragraph. You
> can see what happens by comparing the second screenshot with
> the first.

As far as I can tell, the new and the old are both 12 points. The
difference is in what fontographers call the "x-height." This is the
height of the letter "x" relative to the capital letters in the same
font. Some fonts have relatively tall capital letters compared to the
lower case, and some have relatively short ones. As it happens, TNR has
a relatively small x-height, and Bukinist has a relatively large
x-height. An example of a very small x-height is Garamond.

> As you can see, the font changes to Times New Roman
> automatically even when I try to use ER Bukinist 1251.

I would expect this behavior if you copy/pasted from another document or
application under certain circumstances (see below), but not if you
simply typed. Are you using the standard Windows keyboard driver, or a
third-party applet?

Note on copy/paste and styles: If your document's style definition
specifies Times New Roman and you simply apply ad hoc formatting
throughout instead of changing the definition, you can get the
impression that the entire document is in a different font -- say,
Bukinist. But as far as Word is concerned, the document is in Times New
Roman, except for the entire text. ;-) So when you paste ordinary text
(with no exceptional format marking) into such a document, Word will
look up the style definition and use the default font -- in this case,
Times New Roman. So if you want the whole thing in Bukinist, modify the
style "Normal" and not only will the pasting woes go away, all the Times
New Roman characters will automatically switch to Bukinist.

> Is a solution for Word97 the same as for WordXP?

Don't know. Someone else can probably help you more.

> 2) How do you add accents to certain vowels to distinguish a word
> from others that are spelled alike. What's the best way of doing
> this in MSOffice? And is it done differently in Word 97 and Word
> XP?

There are lots of people here who will have nifty solutions if you use
accents a lot. But if you just have the odd word like "rúki," here's a
quick-and-dirty solution:

1. Select the vowel

2. CTRL-F9 creates a field containing the vowel: { u }

3. Inside the braces, edit the contents to read as follows: {eq \o(u,´)}
    where "u" represents the vowel and "´" is the acute accent.

4. F9 to update the field and you're done.

Notes:

a) The space before the backslash is mandatory, and there should be no
space after the closing parenthesis (if there is, you get "rú ki"). The
space before "eq" is optional and has no effect.

b) The acute accent can be inserted in Word by typing CTRL-' and then a
space.

c) You can use this feature to overstrike any character with any other
character. For example, you can make your own dollar sign: {eq \o(S,/)}.

d) The default alignment is that the two characters are centered at the
same point. If you don't like that, you can align their left or right
edges by adding \al or \ar between the closing parenthesis and the
closing brace.

e) You can format the characters independently inside the field, so for
example if you want to accent a capital letter, you can specify that the
accent should be raised three points above its normal position. In the
same way, you can overstrike a character from one font with a character
from another font.

f) The spell-checker won't like this, but if you only use it
occasionally, who cares?

--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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