Virtual font files for use with WNCY* fonts:

These virtual font files are provided in response to requests from
users in the TeX community. The encoding and ligatures included in the
University of Washington Cyrillic (WNCY) fonts were designed to
support the transliteration scheme used for keying Mathematical
Reviews (MR). The ligatures prevent proper hyphenation when the fonts
are used in cyrillic text, and the encoding is not compatible with
other existing encodings for keying Russian text.  The enclosed
virtual font files eliminate the ligatures whose purpose was to enable
MR transliteration, while retaining the kerning information, and also
provide alternate encodings to allow direct keying of Russian text.

One set of virtual fonts uses the name WLCY*. This set does not
re-encode the characters in the fonts. It simply removes the ligatures
which prevent correct hyphenation of Russian text.

The other two sets of virtual fonts re-encode the characters to
conform to the other existing Cyrillic encoding conventions. The two
most common encodings are KOI-8 and Alternativnyj Variant (AV), and we
have included files to generate virtual fonts remapping the WNCY fonts
to each of these encodings.  Both KOI-8 and AV encodings map the
Cyrillic characters into the upper 128 character locations of the
356-character font. In non-TeX environments, the Cyrillic characters
are commonly accessed by turning on the eighth bit for input from the
keyboard, thus allowing keying of Roman or Cyrillic characters from
the same keyboard. In these virtual fonts, we have imitated this
convention by mapping the standard CM characters to the lower 128
locations and some of the WNCY characters to the upper 128 locations
in the virtual fonts.

The files for KOI-8 encoding are called WKCY*, and those for AV encoding
are called WVCY*.

These virtual font files are provided as is without any macro support,
as the AMS does not use the alternative encodings in-house and does not
have the expertise in-house to do an adequate job of providing such
macro support. If volunteers in the user community can provide such
macro support (e.g. a LaTeX package) and wish to contribute their work
to the AMSFonts distribution we would of course be glad to incorporate
it, to make it more easily available to other users.

Similarly, support for (system-dependent) conveniences like keyboard
remapping for typing Russian is beyond the resources of the AMS and must
be obtained elsewhere.

It is also assumed that the user understands about the use of virtual
fonts in TeX. Those who wish to use these virtual fonts but are
unfamiliar with the use of virtual fonts in TeX are referred to the
documentation for their own local implementation of TeX. Any current
implementation of TeX is capable of using virtual fonts, and includes
documentation for their use. A complete description of virutal fonts by
Donald Knuth is available in TUGBoat, the journal of the TeX Users Group,
Volume 11, No. 1, pages 13-23.

For this initial release, we provide only the 10-point virtual font
for each font family.  These will serve the needs of the majority of
users, and we shall develop and release the remaining sizes in the 
near future.

