accenting cyrillic in Mac

[Steven Clancy]

It seems that the general unicode fonts are allowing one to insert the  
combining accent character these days, although how various programs  
incorporate this can lead to success or failure.

I can accent cyrillic vowels in Word or in HTML documents for display  
on the web using Times New Roman or Lucida Grande. In Word this method  
of accenting also works just fine.

I'm currently working on an upgrade to the Case Book for Russian  
(Janda and Clancy, Slavica Publishers) with on-line exercises. I'll  
spoil the surprise a bit here and would appreciate any feedback.  
Please contact me if you'd like to give the beta site a try. I use  
Safari and have fonts set to Lucida Grande and it all displays great  
with accented vowels. I can also get it to display in Firefox if I set  
the fonts in the preferences to Times New Roman or Lucida Grande,  
otherwise, the accent appears beside the accented vowel. I haven't yet  
tried it on a Windows machine. I was able to convert all of our old  
exercise files for the Case Book for Russian from a custom-made font  
with accented cyrillic vowels to a unicode standard font with the  
combing acute added, so if you have old files with custom fonts, it is  
possible to bring them up to date and preserve them for the future.

The first time you do this, you need to go to the Flag menu  
(International menu) that you use to set keyboards and choose "Show  
Character Palette", then go to European Scripts>Diacritics and choose  
the acute accent "Combining Acute Accent". Then if you have a Word doc  
open, you can just double click it to combine it with the preceding  
vowel. I'm sure this will be lost in Digest mode over seelangs, but  
here is a series of accented cyrillic vowels:  
а́э́ы́о́у́я́е́и́ёю́ (as I write this I'm in Apple  
Mail using Helvetica). You can either cut and paste the accent (it's  
the character one to the right of the main vowel. The cursor moves to  
the right, but appears to stay in the same place and you can select  
just the accent). Or if you already have a document and you need to  
accent it, you can just select the accent in the Character Palette and  
that window will float over whatever program you're using. Then you  
just go through your document and whenever you pass a vowel that needs  
accenting, double click the mouse button and the accent will be  
inserted.

I hope this description isn't too confusing, but early on a Saturday  
morning, I don't have the mental clarity to go into much more detail!

Best of luck!

Steven

Steven Clancy
Senior Lecturer in Russian and Slavic Linguistics
Academic Director, Center for the Study of Languages
Director, Slavic Language Program

University of Chicago
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

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