In this section I'll describe the procedure of making LaTeX typeset Russian. LaTeX is a macro package for TeX offering the user many useful styles, templates, and commands. If you are making your mind on what package to use, I personally suggest LaTeX. Moreover, there are two versions of LaTeX available - 2.09 is the old one, while 2e is a new pre-3.0 release. If you are using LaTeX 2.09, then switch quickly to the 2e. The latter retains compatibility with the old one, but has much more features. Hopefully, version 3 will be released soon. So far I describe the LaTeX 2e setup.
I have an experience with two packages. One is the cmcyralt
package by Vadim V. Zhytnikov (vvzhy@phy.ncu.edu.tw) and
Alexander Harin (harin@lourie.und.ac.za), and the other is the
LH package by the CyrTUG group
with styles and hyphenation for LaTeX2e by Sergei O. Naoumov
(serge@astro.unc.edu). I'll describe both.
Note: Both of these packages require the Cyrillic text to be
typeset using the Alt codeset, not KOI-8! This is caused by
historical reasons, since the creators of these packages used to work
with EmTeX - the MS-DOG version of TeX (they didn't know about Linux
yet :-). Switching to the KOI-8 requires some effort and is being
expected to be done soon. So far, use some utility to convert your
russian text from KOI-8 to Alt. See section
User's tools.
The cmcyralt package can be found on any CTAN (Comprehensive TeX
Archive Network) site like ftp.dante.de. You should get two
collections: the fonts collection from fonts/cmcyralt and the
styles and hyphenation rules from
macros/latex/contrib/others/cmcyralt.
Note: Make sure you have the Sauter package installed, since
cmcyralt requires some fonts from it. You can get this package
from CTAN site as well.
Now you should do the following:
cmcyralt directory in the
/usr/lib/texmf/fonts/cm/. Create the src, tfm, and
vf subdirectories in it. Put there .mf, .tfm, and
vf files respectively.*.fd) from the styles archive to the
appropriate place (in my case it was
/usr/lib/texmf/tex/latex/fd).*.sty) to the appropriate LaTeX styles
directory (in my case /usr/lib/texmf/tex/latex/sty).Now the hyphenation setup. This requires to remake the LaTeX base file.
hyphen.cfg contains the directives for both
English and Russian hyphenation. Extract the one for Russian and place
it to the LaTeX hyphenation config file lthyphen.ltx. In my case,
that file was in /usr/lib/texmf/tex/latex/latex-base.
rhyphen.tex to the same directory. It is needed for
making the new base file. Later, you can remove it.
make' in that directory. Don't for get to make a link
from Makefile to Makefile.unx. During the make process check
the output. There should be a message:
Loading hyphenation patterns for Russian.If everything goes OK, you will get the new
latex.fmt in that
directory. Put it to the appropriate place, where the previous one was
(like /usr/lib/texmf/ini/). Don't forget to save the
previous one!.This is it. The installation is complete. Try processing the examples found in the styles archive. If you are to create the PostScript files without any problems, then everything is OK. Now, to use Cyrillic in LaTeX, prepend your document with the following directive:
\usepackage{cmcyralt}
For more details, see the README file in the cmcyralt styles
archive.
Note: if you do have problems with the examples, provided you
have installed the things right, then probably your TeX system hasn't
been installed correctly. For example, during my first try, every
attempt to create the .pk files for the russian fonts failed
(MakeTeXPK stage). A substantial investigation discovered some
implicit conflict between the localfont and ljfour
METAFONT configurations. It used to work before, but kept
crashing after the cmcyralt installation. Contact your local TeX
guru - TeX is very (sometimes too much) complicated to reconfigure it
without any prior knowledge.
You can obtain the CyrTUG package from the
SunSite archive. Get the files CyrTUGfonts.tar.gz,
CyrTUGmacro.tar.gz, and hyphen.tar.Z.
The process of installation doesn't differ from the previous one.