[XeTeX] An (almost) complete cyrunicode.tex

[Alexej Kryukov]

On Saturday 30 June 2007 01:18, Nikola Lecic wrote:
>
> Although this is technically irrelevant (since this list works in
> XeTeX), I'd propose the following modified classification as more
> clear for someone who wants to eventually complete it in order to
> cover Unicode Cyrillic in its entirety:

Well, I agree that Serbian/Macedonian letters should have not been
mixed with non-Slavic characters, but your list causes even more
objections, mainly because most characters you call specifically
Eastern-Slavic were a part of the original Cyrillic writing system
as invented by Cyril and Methodius and their followers, and thus
were sometime well known to all Orthodox Slavs. And even CYRIE, which
is now considered a specifically Ukrainian letter, had been present
in Serbian (or Montenegrian) alphabet before Karadzhich' reform
was adopted! 

So I think it would be better to divide all Cyrillic characters 
into the folowing groups:

- Russian letters;

- Slavic (Serbian, Macedonian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian) letters
which are in current use and for this reason available in most standard
Cyrillic encodings, such as ISO-8859-5 and windows-1251;

- Historical letters, needed to support the Russian and Bulgarian old
orthographies;

- non-Slavic Cyrillic letters.

There is also a fifth group, namely Old Slavic historical letters, but
I have not listed it here because those characters are not supported in
X2, so that it is very unlikely that somebody will use TeX text command
to access them.

The reason for placing Russian letters into a separate group is
purely technical: they occupy a continuous range of codepoints in
most standard encoding and Unicode, so that it is just convenient to
put them together. Of course this doesn't mean that the Russian
alphabet actually has any priority, so that its letters are considered
"basic" while other Slavic characters "supplementary".

-- 
Regards,
Alexey Kryukov <anagnost {at} yandex {dot} ru>

Moscow State University
Historical Faculty