Cyrillic Russian Keyboard and Fonts
Posted by raetsel on January 11, 2007
Well for once a post with questions but no answers. I’ve been spamming a few forums and sites with the following:-
When I am not playing with my Kubuntu system one of my other hobbies is learning Russian.
In attempt to combine the two I have bought a bi-lingual keyboard QWERTY and Cyrillic (ЙЦУКЕН) I’ve installed the ru localisation for KDE and set up the keyboard variants. As you can see it works fine in Russian mode. Я говорю по-русски (I speak Rusian) but as a student I need to know where the stress goes in a word and this is usually done by adding acute accent above the stressed vowel. Then I can put them in applications like KWordQuiz the vocab trainer.
The only way I have found to do that so far is to type the word in Open Office Writer then use the insert special symbol option and choose the accent from the Combining Diacritical marks, then I can cut and paste in to KWordQuiz or any other KDE app. (Interestingly pasting into google mail in firefox strips out the stress marks, I have just discovered, but it works here although the accent is a little off to the right Я говорю́ по-ру́сски )
I believe I should be able to just add these accents from the keyboard using either a “dead key” or a compose key setting but so far I have been unable to do this.
Any ideas what I need to do?
In case it is of relevance the keyboard was bought from a trader on ebay details here
This certainly makes me realise how much I take for granted using English on a keyboard in a computing context.
Paul said
Hi,
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I believe I should be able to just add these accents from the keyboard using either a “dead key” or a compose key setting but so far I have been unable to do this.
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No, it’s incorrect – and it’s why some applications strip such symbol:
unlike say French, in Russian alphabet there is NO such thing as “accents”, so input tools do NOT support that -
being it Windows or another platfrom.
“stress mark” (it’s not “accent mark”) – is used only in very special cases like yours or say a book for foreignors studying Russian.
Again, there is NO standard ways to place such stress mark because it’s NOT a part of any Russian letter
Under Windows the approach is the same as you found (artificially place some symbol to look like stress mark) and result is the same:
in Word 2003:
– have NumLOck “On”
– type a Russian vowel, then press and hold Alt button
and then on numeric keypad at the right type 769
Regards,
Paul
http://Kbd.RusWin.net
Ad Caweau said
There are more ways of marking stress. You could make the stressed vowel bold. It’s readability is good and is cut-and-pasteable to most applications.
A low-tech way to mark stress in Russian is putting an ‘ behind the last letter of the stressed syllable.
Have fun learning russian!
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