Sergei B. Pokrovsky
Russian/English Alphabet Disambiguation
Explanation
The Civil Cyrillic Alphabet, introduced by Peter the Great, makes many
Russian letters look like some Latin ones; this is a nuisance for the
programmers: what looks identical on the screen can be quite different
in the code; moreover, some letters are identical in one case (T,Т
y,у) and different in the other (t,т Y,У). The Western programmers
know a similar problem with O/0 and 1/l/I disambiguation.
In a Unicode font the problem is even worse, because the
Latin/Cyrillic ambiguity is complicated with the Greek. Still, I've
tried to modify a couple of the BDF
Unicode
fonts by Markus Kuhn which I use on Sparc computers so that I can
see the difference and guess which alphabet a given letter belongs to.
Actually these are 9x15 and 9x18 fonts in the plain and bold flavors:
-Pok-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1
etc.
Screenshots
- Digit/letter disambiguation:
(I've modified the 1 and the 4 glyphs: I've removed the serif under 1, and opened the 4; that is not essential for the purpose of disambiguation, it is a matter of personal preference.)
-
Latin-Cyrillic-Greek disambiguation:
- Text samples:
- Making the difference visible:
Note that a wrong letter in a translation may go undetected by an
automatic validator, and make unusable the index entry based on it
(e.g. in an e-book).
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