Today I decided to finally bite the bullet and set up X to let me enter Russian (mostly for e-mail purposes). Surprisingly enough, this was not as hard as I had expected—the HOWTOs and other documentation have gotten a lot better since the last time I considered this endeavor (3 years ago or so).
The time breakdown for this was as follows:
Somehow, the whole procedure recalled freshman year in college in my mind. Might have had something to do with the amount of time I spent back then configuring things like mail readers, window managers, X, emacs...
Next project: find time for my annual search for a tool that converts TeX to MathML. The gotchas here are that it needs to deal
with the various AMS packages, with things defined via
\newtheorem, and with things defined via \def and
\newcommand (though I'll settle for just one or the other if both
are not supported). Oh, and dealing with \newenvironment would be
a nice bonus. (Unlike some, I do not indulge in \catcode or
\let much, so it's ok if those are not handled very well...) If
you know of such a beast, please let me know.
your first step should be: buy a bilingual keyboard, they are not that much more expensive (asking in russian bookshops did the trick here in berlin)
Posted by: Bernd on May 8, 2003 12:38 AMI considered that. For the amount of use this is likely to see, it's not worth it. Plus I like the feel of my keyboard, and I'm not willing to risk the return of wrist issues from using keyboards that don't quite feel right... So buying a keyboard would be a much larger investment of time than I can make right now. :(
Posted by: Boris on May 8, 2003 12:50 AMX does have a transliterated layout, but it's a variant of the
general "ru" one. Try setxkbmap ru phonetic. (There is also
the ru_yawerty, but it doesn't actually seem to work.)
My XFree86 4.0.1 install certainly has no Russian layout other than "ru"... (I did look at all the keyboard layout definition files before doing any real work...)
Posted by: Boris on May 10, 2003 12:54 AM