Malyshev Samarin and Vulis

[Laurent.SIEBENMANN@math.u-psud.fr (Laurent SIEBENMANN)]

   ***  Malyshev Samarin and Vulis ***

The article on Russian TeX mentioned bu D. Vulis is

@Article{Malyshev:TB12-2-212,
  author =       "Basil Malyshev and Alexander Samarin and Dimitri
                 Vulis",
  title =        "{{Russian {\TeX}}}",
  journal =      TUGboat,
  year =         "1991",
  volume =       "12",
  number =       "2",
  pages =        "212--214",
  month =        Jun,
}

This scheme of Russification adds two palpable features to
those offered by WCY* (see my earlier posts):

1) Russian characters are permitted in math on the same basis
as cmmi* latin characters.

2) Control sequence names can contain Russian cyrillic 
characters.

The scheme applies to any TeX site at which the keyboard
encoding for cyrillic lies between 128 and 255 and the keyboard
includes ascii latin plus cyrillic in an 8-bit screen font.

The general idea is the simplest possible: extend the CM fonts
to vfs including cyrillic characters exactly where they are in
the screen font (which allows feature (2)).  The vf is
generically called xcm* and the x indicates that the fonts are
system dependent, i.e., not "standard".

The cyrillic characters normally come from standard CM-style
fonts of N. Glonti which I believe I have seen posted (but I
cannot recall where); this series is called CMC* for Computer
modern Cyrillic.  They can equally come from WNCY* (or WCY*).

The vf's are automatically generated from the screen font 
encoding by a utility called TFMERGE.  

The DVI files produced by TeX are reduced to a standard form
by another utility POSTEX.

In all this is a very nice system and I believe it 
is essentially the one I have encountered repeatedly in Russia.

The utilities TFMERGE and POSTEX are not in evidence on CTAN,
could someone provide URLs of postings?

Although I find the features (1) and (2) of marginal interest,
this Russification seems impeccable to me. On the other hand,
it will require considerable patience to obtain and install,
so it is not for casual users.  The simpler WCY*
scheme *can* be instantly installed on any system, so it is
indeed for casual user

                 Larry Siebenmann

Postscriptum: POSTEX does much less than the general VF
expander DVICOPY but what it does it achieves in a perfectly
standard and rigorous way whereas DVICOPY is enmeshed in
complex and controversial drift correction problems. POSTEX is
a tool eminently worth having. For somewhat analogous reasons
I would like to see TFMERGE publicly posted as well.


PS.  In view of what Pierre tells us about U of Washington
attitude to Tom Ridgeway's work, I wounder whether the 
name change 

     WCY*   ==>  RCY*

would not be in order.