A couple of years ago I spent a few days to russify MiKTeX 1.11. To do that, one had to download a lot of files, unzip them, apply some patches, put files in the correct places, edit some of them, run TeX a few times and so on. After I did that, I collected all the necessary files in a package, rumik.zip (886 KB), which was very easy to use - just downoad it, unzip in the localtexmf directory, and run initexmf --dump. Since the installation procedure was so easy, Rumik became popular very fast, especially among mathematicians, i.e. people who need TeX the most.
Later versions of MiKTeX contain all the necessary fonts, corrected babel, hyphenation patterns etc., so now Rumik became unnecessary. Also, because of the changing of the directory structure of MiKTeX, Rumik doesn't work with MiKTeX 2.1. Many people emailed me asking what to do. Fortunately, one can make MiKTeX 2.1 able to produce Russian text, without Rumik, in a few simple steps. Here they are.
- Go to Start-Programs-MikTeX-MiKTeX Options.
- Select Language tab.
- If you see 'russian' listed, select it and unselect languages you are not going to use. Otherwise, click New, type language name 'russian' and browse to find a hyphenation file. I use ashyphen.t2 included in the rumik.zip. Probably, a newer version exists.
- Edit C:\texmf\tex\generic\config\language.dat, putting % in front of the
languages you are not going to use:
% french frhyph.tex % =patois % german dehypht.tex % =austrian % ngerman dehyphn.tex % =naustrian
for instance, and deleting % in front ofrussian ruhyphen.tex % note: edit ruhyphen.tex for your encoding!
(leaving % in the middle untouched). - In spite of what is written above, you don't have to edit C:\texmf\tex\generic\ruhyphen\ruhyphen.tex for your encoding, unless you use something extraordinary.
- If you prefer typing rather than clicking, type initexmf --dump in the Run field or using MS-DOS Prompt. The same thing can be done by clicking Start - Programs - MiKTeX - Maintenance - Create All Format Files.
- Enjoy. Here is an example of Russian TeX:
\documentclass{article} \usepackage[cp1251,koi8-r]{inputenc} \usepackage[english,russian]{babel} \begin{document} Here goes some text in koi8-r input encoding. % To switch the current language (and font encoding) to English, % use \English macro (or \Eng) % To switch the current language (and font encoding) to Russian, % use \Russian macro (or \Rus) % Switching languages will, in particular, set the correct hyphenation. % You may use several different input encodings in one document! :-) % \inputencoding{cp1251} Проба пера \fontencoding{T2A}\selectfont Proba Pera Проба пера \end{document}
The best source of Russian news in Russian is National News Service. In English: Russia Today. See also Radio Liberty. NNS maintains an interesting International Media Survey in Russian as well. One could get additional references on Friends and Partners News page, or Russia on the Web's Information & News, where one can find a comprehensive and well organized list of Russia-related Web sites. Alive! maintains a list of the best Russian sites. Созвездие Интернета is trying to do the same thing in Russia. One of the best starting points in Russian is relcom's Treasures of Internet. There are quite a few Russian newsgroups as well, in particular, soc.culture.russian.moderated moderated by Igor Chudov.
 | Silver Rain - Live |
| Radio 101 - Live |
| BBC - News |
| Радио Свобода - Live |
| Voice of America |
|
| 25+ часов Высоцкого |
Relcom's Literature, definitely, is not the best source in Russian anymore. Maksim Moshkow, a mechmat's alumnus, collected a nice Library. A good source in English is Pittsburgh REESWeb's Internet Language and Literature Resources. See also A. Farber's collection, Dmitry Tribis library, Литера Маши Школьниковой, Alexander Burstein's Russian Links, Книжные полки Алексея Несененко and Sergei Ivanov's Russian Books. Here are some other interesting sites: Vladimir Voinovich, Русская фантастика, Набережная Житинского, Кулички, Kniga.
| Наука и жизнь |
| За науку (outdated) |
| Открытые системы |
| Информика |
| Лебедь, Леда |
| Вестник |
| Zhurnal.ru: Polit.ru |
| Журнальный зал |
| News and Media |
To be able to type in Russian, one can glue Russian/English stickers on a regular keyboard; I didn't try that. I tried a few other approaches though, and best that I found, was the Otpad 2.2, a text editor written by Igor Sidorenkov, with transliterated input of russian letters. Unlike so called phonetic keyboard driver mode of action, typed in keystroke like "ya" or "shch" will result in output of a single russian letter on the screen. The editor also features integrated ability to convert KOI-8, unicode, and transliterated russian texts to Win 1251 encoding (reverse conversion is also possible). One can use the on-line Universal Cyrillic Converter maintained by Ilya Sandler, to convert an entered text, home pages and files written in alt, koi-8, win, mac, ISO-8859-5 or transliteration, to other cyrillic encoding from this list.
To obtain more detailed information about Cyrillic fonts and how to install them on any computer, go to the Friends and Partners Cyrillic Text page. Also, if you want to download something useful, you can find a lot of editors, converters, language tutors and dictonaries in the Windows directory of the Funet Russian Archive.
Updated on July 4, 2001.
Copyright © 1996–2001 Aleksandrs
Mihailovs
