Cyrillic in LaTeX and Postscript and Unicode

Cyrillic, LaTeX, Postscript and Unicode

Let's see how to deal with the Cyrillic alphabet in LaTeX, Postscript, and Unicode. You might also be interested in this free on-line journal on Postscript and PDF. And just in case you need a PDF to Word converter, use OpenOffice with its PDF Import Extension. You can import PDF and export as Word, all with free software! Here are some other great sources of detailed information on how to deal with LaTeX fonts:
Fonts and TeX The LaTeX Font Catalogue

Cyrillic in LaTeX

Install the texlive-lang-cyrillic and texlive-lang-greek packages using yum or apt.

Modify your source document file to include some packages. Do this in the block at the top of the file where you're setting things up.

[ ... ]
\usepackage[OT2,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[russian,greek,english]{babel}
[ ... ]

Now down within your LaTeX document file you could, for example, include the Cyrillic alphabet:

[ ... ]
This is the Cyrillic alphabet:

{\sffamily\foreignlanguage{russian}{
a b v g d e {\cyrzh} z i {\cyrishrt} k l m n o p r s t u f
h c q x w {\cyrhrdsn} y {\cyrsftsn} {\cyrerev} {\cyryu} {\cyrya}

A B V G D E {\CYRZH} Z I {\CYRISHRT} K L M N O P R S T U F
H C Q X W {\CYRHRDSN} Y {\CYRSFTSN} {\CYREREV} {\CYRYU} {\CYRYA}
}}

{\sffamily\foreignlanguage{russian}{
{\CYRYA} byl remontikom v bolnice.
}}
[ ... ]

The result will look like this:

Amazon 0140120416

Amazon 0631207570

Find missing letters in this file, part of the texlive-lang-cyrillic package:
/usr/share/doc/texlive-doc/latex/cyrillic/cyoutenc.pdf

This page is very helpful for Cyrillic and many other character sets:
http://www.bitjungle.com/isoent/index_files/isoent-ref.pdf

Let's Do Greek

The above showed also including Greek language support.

Let's see how to use it!

Put something like this in your LaTeX source document:

[ ... ]
\usepackage[OT2,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[russian,greek,english]{babel}
[ ... ]

This is the Greek alphabet:

{\sffamily\foreignlanguage{greek}{
a b g d e z h j i k l m n x o p r s c t u f q y w \\
'a 'e 'h 'i "i "u 'o 'u 'w \\
A B G D E Z H J I K L M N X O P R S T U F Q Y W \\
'A 'E 'H 'I "I "U 'O 'U 'W}}

{\sffamily\foreignlanguage{greek}{swkr{'a}ths}}
[ ... ]

That generates the following. Notice how σ/ς works: ς is sigma-final.

An alternative is the textcomp package, but for that you need a Cyrillic keyboard for the Russian part:

\documentclass[letterpaper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage[russian,greek,english]{textcomp}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1,T2A]{fontenc}

\begin{document}

The last language listed will be the active
(or default) one.  The others can be chosen
for large blocks:

\selectlanguage{russian}

Горбачёв

\selectlanguage{greek}

Ellhnik`o ke`imeno.

\selectlanguage{english}

You can also insert short pieces of text in
arbitrary languages, even within paragraphs
of a different language:

The capital of Russia is
\foreignlanguage{russian}{Moskva.}

The capital of Greece is
\foreignlanguage{greek}{Ajhna.}

\end{document}

Also see:
LaTeX/Internationalization
Wikibooks Multilingual LaTeX with the Babel Package
Reed College How to make LaTeX2e understand Russian Greek in LaTeX

Cyrillic in Postscript

The theory is that you can do something like the following and get Postscript that renders Cyrillic:

%!
%%Creator: Your Name Here
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 792 611
%%
%% Postscript Cyrillic demo
%%
%% Define measurements in millimeters, 1 mm = 2.834645 Postscript point
/mm { 2.834645 mul } def
%% Use the Cyrillic-Italic font.  Could be just Cyrillic, etc:
/Cyrillic-Italic findfont 12 scalefont setfont
%% Move to the location (50mm, 50mm) and Russify my name:
50 mm 50 mm moveto (Robert Vilhelmoviq Kromvell) midshow
showpage 

-/_  for  "eh/EH"
j/J  for  "zh/ZH"
y/Y  for  "e-kratkaya/E-KRATKAYA"
[/{  for  "yuri/YURI"
]/}  for  "yu/YU"
h/H  for  "kh/KH"
q/Q  for  "ch/CH"
w/W  for  "sh/SH"
x/X  for  "shch/SHCH"
c/C  for  "ts/TS"
+/\# for  "YAT/yat" 

Cyrillic in Unicode

The real answer is what you find at the Unicode organization's site. I have this HTML table for my own use — I have a copy on my laptop, and I don't have to bother with rendering the Unicode PDF file. Plus, you can see how well your browser renders Unicode... Both Firefox and Chrome (and even Konqueror last I checked) do a fine job on Linux and OpenBSD.

Unicode describes the codes as:
0400-040f — Cyrillic extensions
0410-044f — Basic Russian alphabet
0450-045f — Cyrillic extensions
0460-0481 — Historic letters
0482-0489 — Historic miscellaneous
048a-04f9 — Cyrillic extensions
04fa-04ff — Additions for Nivkh
0500-050f — Komi letters
0510-0513 — Cyrillic extensions
Codes 048a-04ff are mostly for Cyrillic representation of non-Slavic languages like Sami, Azerbaijani, Yakut, Tatar, and so on. 0500-0513 are entirely for Cyrillic representation of Komi, Enets, Khanty, Chuckchi, etc. Read the Unicode pages to see how arcane some of these are, and to get explanations or at least names and language attributions for all the characters.

To use this table: Place the code between &#x and ;. So, the Russian word да is created with:
да