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info-tex@SHSU.edu
Re: Serbian TeX
Michael Barr writes:
>              Moreover, a Serbian alphabet is not the same as the Cyrillic
>alphabet.  There are a few Cyrillic characters it doesn't use and there
>letters not found in Cyrillic.

To remind ourselves some commonly used terminology:

A typeface is called 'Russian' if it includes the 32 Russian letters (and if
it includes it's even better :).

A typeface is called 'Cyrillic' if it includes the Russian letters _as well as_
the Cyrillic letters used in Serbian (e.g., chje, lje), Ukrainian (e.g., yi,
rounded ye), and Macedonian (e.g., gje, kje).

There are plenty of Cyrillic letters that Serbian doesn't use, but all the
letters used in it are, by definition, Cyrillic (but not necessarily used in
Russian!).

Thus, WNCY*, developed by Tom Ridgeway at U Wash, are Cyrillic, because they
include Serbian and Ukrainian characters. The CMCYR* family developed by
Alexander Samarin & Nana Gonti at IHEP is Russian-only, as are a few other
commercially available Russian typefaces I've seen (none worth the $$$ asked).

There are differences in the traditional italic forms of a few letters common
to Russian and Serbian (g, t, p, etc): the Russian forms are more cursive and
the Serbian forms are just slanted. WNCYI* has only the Russian forms.

There was an article in TUGBoat a while back describing Serbocroatian
hyphenation ppatterns; I suspect they were geared toward Croatian writing.

A really useful Cyrillic typeface would also include some obsolete letters
(like yat', fita, & izhitsa used in Russian before 1918; I need them and WNCY*
have them, and there are many more obsolete letters that some folks I know
could use) and the extra letters used in non-Slavic languages whose
writing is Cyrillic-based (like Mongol, Tatar, and Uzbek; there's a list of
those and I've been begging Tom Ridgeway literally for years to add them :).
TeX would be a terrific tool for processing these curious languages.
--
Dimitri Vulis       DLV@DM.COM

"Glokaya kuzdra buldanula bokra i buldachit bokryonka."