[tex-live] enquiry regarding Ukrainian "i"

[Semen Trygubenko / Семен Тригубенко]

> >> I'm having the following problem with inputenc package:
> >> Ukrainian letter "i" is substituted with Latin "i" during compilation.
> >> Letters look identical so it is not a problem for displaying text, but
> >> it makes it hard to search inside the generated pdf using conventional
> >> means.
> >
> > the inputenc mechanism provides glyphs to represent the incoming
> > character stream.  given that the t2a fonts don't have an "i" in the
> > Cyrillic half of their glyph table, they use the "i" in the Latin
> > half of the table.

Ah … Thank you very much for this insight!

At this point in my life I'd prefer it to bomb, rather than produce an munged output
that looks OK but is not searchable or copiable … :-)

So, presumably, once the substitution has occurred (Ukrainian "і" and Latin "i" with the
t2a's glyph for i) there's not much we can do? Is there space in Cyrillic half of the glyph table
to include a clone of t2a's glyph for i so that Ukrainian "і" and Latin "i"
could be distinguished further down the line?

As far as I can see, this is the only problem with Latex handling
Ukrainian documents, otherwise it is very usable (in conjunction with cmap
for search and copy) …


> > (my guess is that the cmap package doesn't help here, but i can't
> > convince myself...)
> >
> The cmap package could help, it depends whether it contains toUnicode
> map for the T2A encoding.

I had no success with cmap. However, I didn't look for long as I thought the problem occurs earlier on
in the pipeline somewhere, hence in the example file I didn't include any of my cmap
sorties. If there was indeed a way to get cmap to work somehow, would it be able
to handle multilingual Latex source, e.g. English and Ukrainian?


> > if i am right, you need to go with xetex or luatex, and a font that
> > covers Cyrillic as unicode to get the "correct" output.

I'm trying to get myself up to speed with xetex or luatex.
Right now it seems that the Latex source I've got is not immediately
compilable by either, so I think some reading up is in order.
I will let you know the results when I get somewhere, but, meanwhile, if
someone could think of a cheap way to get Latex to work I would be very much obliged.


-- 
Семен Тригубенко http://trygub.com
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