Re: Vulis and the WCY* fonts

[dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis)]

Laurent.SIEBENMANN@math.u-psud.fr (Laurent SIEBENMANN) writes:

> \bibitem [DLV89] Dimitri Vulis, ``Notes on Russian \TeX,''
>   {\sl \TUB\/} {\bf10} (1989), no.~3, 332--36.

I think there was another one with Samarin and Malyshev 93.

> In this article Vulis mentions having privately deleted from
> the WNCY* fonts the weird ligatures for AMS ligature-based
> ASCII keyboarding.
>
> He gives the resulting fonts no name, so it is not at all clear
> that they were ever posted or distributed. Virtual fonts are
> mentioned as a coming technology; one can wonder whether
> virtual fonts based on WNCY are in circulation somewhere.
> Strangely, the Vulis hyphenation patterns are expressed in the
> WNCY encoding, but no explicit mention of any fonts suitable
> for use with them is present in suhyph.tex.
>
> Vulis gives as motives for deleting the AMS exotic ligatures
> the various malfunctions of hyphenation I have been mentioning.
>
> He mentions none of the various damages to implicit kerning
> that I have turned up; this sort of weakness of TeX's implicit
> kerning goes mostly unmentioned in the TeXbook, and came to my
> attention first in 1991--2.  I heard the bad news from Bernd
> Raichle or at least some of it.  If anyone has proof of
> awareness in the 1980s please speak up.

I did something very improper: I called the altered fonts by the
same WNCY* names for internal use.  Fortunately, I never had to
give DVi files to anyone.

> Finally, Vulis mentions a discussion list for Russian TeX that has
> disappeared; perhaps its archives exist somewhere and could be
> posted by CyrTUG or on CTAN or in Nelson's archives.

??? RusTeX-L is alive and well; there's a continuing discussion how
to improve the hyphenation patterns.