How to make LaTeX2e understand russian

What's in this document

Conventions

What you will need

1. A reasonably recent version of LaTeX2e. I recommend teTeX 0.4 which includes LaTeX2e of 1996/12/01. Earlier version of LaTeX may work, but it should be LaTeX2e, not LaTeX 2.09. teTeX can be found on any CTAN site at /tex-archive/systems/unix/teTeX/. Most Linux distributions include teTeX, so if you have Linux you probably also have teTeX.
2. Babel package version 3.6. Most LaTeX distributions, teTeX in particular, come with Babel bundled with them. Note that you must have Babel 3.6, as earlier versions did not include support for russian language. If you have teTeX 0.4, you should be all set.
3. LH cyrillic fonts. Those can be found on any CTAN site at /tex-archive/fonts/LH, as well as on ftp.relcom.ru at /unix/text/fmt/tex/LHfonts.tar.gz.

What to do

Actually, LaTeX already supports Russian language through its Babel package. The problem is that Babel's Russian works in LWN encoding, which means that you enter Russian text using latin transliteration. For example, you type "sobaka" to get the Russian word for "dog". However, most Russian-speaking Linux users have carefully read the Linux Cyrillic HOWTO (haven't you?) and know how to enter Russian letters directly from their keyboard. We will teach Babel to use LYC encoding, which corresponds to the "alternative" (CP 866) Russian encoding. We use this encoding, because so do LH fonts. "But I use KOI-8 encoding under Linux!", I hear you screaming. Yes, I know, so do I. We will address this issue, don't worry. Read on.

So, let's get down to work.

1. First we need the encoding definition file, LYCenc.def. Get it from here (it's gzipped and takes 1823 bytes). Alternatively, if you love to do everything yourself, you can create it yourself using texmf/tex/generic/babel/LWNenc.def as a template. To do it,
   1. Copy LWNenc.def to LYCenc.def
   2. Edit LYCenc.def and replace every occurence of character sequence LWN to LYC.
   3. Go around line 90 in this file and replace the definitions of all \CYR* macros with real Russian letters in alternative encoding.
   Place your LYCenc.def to texmf/tex/generic/babel/.
2. Now we need font description (.fd) files for LH fonts. Go to texmf/tex/generic/babel directory. You'll see a bunch of files whose names match LWN*.fd. To create the corresponding LYC*.fd files from them, use the following script:

     
   #!/bin/csh
   foreach lwnname (LWN*.fd)
     set lycname = LYC`expr substr $lwnname 4 255`
     sed 's/LWN/LYC/g;s/wn/lh/g' $lwnname > $lycname
   end
   

   (Note that if your csh is not in /bin, you'll need to change the first line. Tcsh will work, too). Run this script in texmf/tex/generic/babel directory (as root). Now you have LYC*.fd files in place.
3. Now we'll tell Babel to use LYC encoding instead of LWN. Go to your texmf/tex/generic/babel directory and edit russianb.ldf found there. Replace every occurence of the character sequence LWN with LYC (use replace function of your favourite editor). Then edit cyrmath.sty and do the same replace. Actually, this is it, but you may want to do some additional fiddling with russianb.ldf. For some obscure reason, Babel believes that in Russian language the symbols '!', '?', ':', ';' should be preceeded by a noticable space. Since it looks very strange, we will eliminate this weird behavior. Go around line 149 in russianb.ldf and comment out several lines, so that this fragment looks like this:

   %\initiate@active@char{:}
   %\initiate@active@char{;}
   %\initiate@active@char{!}
   %\initiate@active@char{?}
   \initiate@active@char{"}
   \addto\extrasrussian{\languageshorthands{russian}}
   \addto\extrasrussian{%
   %  \bbl@activate{:}\bbl@activate{;}%
   %  \bbl@activate{!}\bbl@activate{?}%
   \bbl@activate{"}}
   %\declare@shorthand{russian}{;}{%
   %  \ifhmode
   %    \ifdim\lastskip>\z@
   %      \unskip\penalty\@M\thinspace
   %    \else
   %      \thinspace
   %    \fi
   %  \fi
   %  \string;}
   %\declare@shorthand{russian}{:}{%
   %  \ifhmode
   %    \ifdim\lastskip>\z@
   %      \unskip\penalty\@M\thinspace
   %    \else
   %      \thinspace
   %    \fi
   %  \fi
   %  \string:}
   %\declare@shorthand{russian}{!}{%
   %  \ifhmode
   %    \ifdim\lastskip>\z@
   %      \unskip\penalty\@M\thinspace
   %    \else
   %      \thinspace
   %    \fi
   %  \fi
   %  \string!}
   %\declare@shorthand{russian}{?}{%
   %  \ifhmode
   %    \ifdim\lastskip>\z@
   %      \unskip\penalty\@M\thinspace
   %    \else
   %      \thinspace
   %    \fi
   %  \fi
   %  \string?}
   %\declare@shorthand{system}{:}{\string:}
   %\declare@shorthand{system}{!}{\string!}
   %\declare@shorthand{system}{?}{\string?}
   %\declare@shorthand{system}{;}{\string;}
   

   Now Babel is ready to use the LYC encoding
4. Now it's time to install the LH fonts. Copy all the source files (those with .mf extension) to a suitable directory, e.g. texmf/fonts/source/public/lh. Optionally, you can copy the .tfm (TeX Font Metrics) files to texmf/fonts/tfm/public/lh, but if you don't do it, the .tfm files will be generated automatically on demand.
5. Now, run texhash (as root) to update the texmf/ls-R database. Just type 'texhash' at your shell prompt and hit enter.
6. At this point LaTeX is ready to typeset in Russian, but it won't hyphenate Russian text. Now we'll teach it to hyphenate. To begin with, you'll need Russian hyphenation patterns. Here you may find yourself in one of the three situations:
   • You already have Russian hyphenation patterns for LaTeX2e. Great! Use them.
   • You have Russian hyphenation patterns from an old LaTeX 2.09 distribution (e.g. DOS-based emTeX). Then get this fragment, gunzip it and include in the beginning of your hyphenation pattern file.
   • You don't have Russian hyphenation patterns at all. Then just download these.
   So, one way or another, you have those hyphenation patterns in the file called ruhyphen.tex. Copy this file to texmf/tex/generic/hyphen. Then go to texmf/tex/generic/config and edit language.dat found there. Comment out any languages you don't need (but don't touch American, USenglish, or english - this must go first), and add the following line:

   russian   ruhyphen.tex
   

   Run texhash again.
7. Now we have to recreate the LaTeX format file latex.fmt to make LaTeX load russian hyphenation patterns. Go to texmf/tex/latex/config and issue the following command:

     initex 'latex.ini \dump'
   

   This will produce a file named latex.fmt. Move this file to texmf/web2c directory.
8. Now, the final touch. All our Russian setup works in "alternative" encoding, while you are probably using KOI-8 on your Linux box. The quick (and dirty) solution would be to translate every LaTeX file to "alternative" before latexing. This would be very inconvenient and fortunately there is a better way. Use the koi2alt package, which you can find right here. Gunzip this file and put the resulting koi2alt.sty to a suitable directory, for example texmf/tex/latex/local (create this directory if necessary). Then run 'texhash' again. Warning: I have found this package on the Net, but made some corrections to it. The original package had a small glitch which resulted in the letter "yo" appearing as a capital "Ya" instead. So, if you took koi2alt.sty from somewhere else, make sure yours is correct.
9. One more step is necessary if you want LaTeX to properly distinguish between Russian uppercase and lowercase letter, particularily if you want LaTeX \uppercase and \lowercase commands to work. The latter is needed, for example, to properly format headings in amsart document class. So, to accomplish this, you need this koi8case package. Just like with koi2alt, gunzip this file and place to a suitable directory, such as texmf/tex/latex/local. Note that this package will work only for KOI8 encoding. Warning: I created this package myself, but I'm not a LaTeX guru, so I can't be sure that I followed the safest and most elegant way to go. Use this package at your own risk.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}
\usepackage{koi2alt}
\usepackage{koi8case}
\begin{document}

... type something in Russian here ...

\end{document}

If you want koi2alt and koi8case packages to always be used whenever you typeset document in russian, you can add the following two lines towards the end of russianb.ldf in texmf/tex/generic/babel (right before the line \ldf@finish{russian}):

\AtEndOfPackage{\RequirePackage{koi2alt}}
\AtEndOfPackage{\RequirePackage{koi8case}}

Disclaimer

Credits