accenting cyrillic in Mac

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Steven Clancy wrote:

> 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.

Exactly right.

> ... 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.

When I copy/paste this paragraph into Word 2003 for Windows, the accents 
display correctly over their respective characters, and what's more the 
cursor moves over the character-accent pairs as units, not pausing 
between them. On the other hand, my slightly antiquated mail program 
(Mozilla 1.7.13) displays them sequentially, "а," then accent, then "е," 
then accent, etc. But that's because I'm in plain-text mode; if I reply 
in HTML your quoted material displays correctly.

However, (returning to Word), if I mark these combinations as Russian 
and use them to create words -- for example, "стола́" -- Word's 
spell-checker does not recognize them. Apparently, an accented "а́" is 
treated as distinct from the unaccented one, and the accent is not 
ignored, so "стола́" does not match the dictionary entry "стола."

-- 
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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