[XeTeX] An (almost) complete cyrunicode.tex

[Nikola Lecic]

On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 12:55:30 +0400
Alexej Kryukov <anagnost at yandex.ru> wrote:

> Well, I have mentioned Bulgarian just because it used one letter
> (namely BIG YUS) which overwise would be placed into another
> category. Of course I can add also Serbian/Montenegrian, as it is
> covered by the same set of characters (i.e. cp1251 + Russian pre-1918
> letters). But that's really all, because other modern Slavic
> languages which use the Cyrillic script got their contemporary
> alphabets together with their identity; so, no old orthographies here.

Yes, Montenegrin (Cyrillic) printing houses of 1490's :)

> > Well, here I can't see any logic :) Despite your own explanation of
> > the origin of Cyrillic (which is well known to all us Cyrillic
> > users), you argue that Russian+Slavic (isn't Russian Slavic?) is the
> > most accurate division because (modern) Russian character set
> > happened to be the first in Unicode.
> 
> This is because my classification is based mainly on purely technical 
> reasons, so that any historic/semantic considerations are taken into
> account at the second turn. If they allow to clarify subdivisions
> based on Unicode and legacy standards, they are good; otherwise they
> are evil. But Unicode separates 32 Russian letters from other Slavic
> letters, and, whether you like it or not (BTW, some Russian users
> also don't like the fact that YO is encoded separately) we have to
> live with it. Otherwise imagine, say, a German user who whould argue
> that umlauts should be listed among the ASCII latin letters rather
> than in the separate Latin Supplement block...

Well, I think that this comparison is 100% bogus (because you can say
the same about many letters that belong to the continuous Cyrillic
range), but before further commenting: this discussion is very
interesting to me, but since it's a bit off-topic (on a XeTeX list :)),
I propose to continue it off-list.

However, if you, Evgenie (and others) don't think so and find it more
generally interesting, then...

As of the character list, I think that Evgenie's last proposal is nice
compromise; maybe he can just sort the letters by their code -- and the
nightmare of non-Slavic list will disappear. Maybe he can add
full Unicode names behind the %s.

Nikoa Lečić