3. Editing texts

3.1. Emacs

Emacs is able to display Belarusian characters out of box in many Linux distributions. However, the following conditions should satisfy:

• Cyrillic iso-8859-5 fonts should be installed.

• Emacs-mule package should be installed.

The user may want to change the default keyboard layout ("input method" in emacs slang) to jcuken. This feature is provided by belarusian.el along with some other goodies. Read the comments in the beginning of belarusian.el for details on the setup procedure.

After installing belarusian.el, you will be able to switch the input method, by typing C-\-cyrillic-belarusian-RET

For a more user-friendly setup, put the following lines in the .emacs file:

 ;; enables PC-like key mappings
 (pc-bindings-mode) 
 ;; enables PC-like selection
 (pc-selection-mode)
 ;; highlight selection
 (transient-mark-mode t)
 ;; use as many multilingual fonts as possible
 (set-default-font "fontset-standard") 
 ;; set up windows-1251 as default encoding everywhere
 (codepage-setup 1251)
 (set-terminal-coding-system 'cp1251)
 (set-keyboard-coding-system nil)
 (setq default-buffer-file-coding-system 'cp1251)
 (set-selection-coding-system 'cp1251)
 (prefer-coding-system 'cp1251)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'windows-1251 'cp1251)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'microsoft-1251 'cp1251)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'microsoft-cp1251 'cp1251)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'windows-cp1251 'cp1251)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'koi8-u 'cyrillic-koi8)
 (define-coding-system-alias 'KOI8-R 'cyrillic-koi8)
 (modify-coding-system-alist 'file "\.*" 'cp1251)
 (modify-coding-system-alist 'file "\\.el$" 'iso-2022-7bit)					
				

3.2. Spell-checking

• If you do not have ispell 3.1.20, install it from any Linux distribution CD.

• Download the package belspell.tar.gz. Unpack it and run

  buildhash belarusian.sml belarusian.aff belarusian.hash

• Copy belarusian.hash to </usr/lib/ispell or wherever your ispell hash tables are.

• in order to spell-check a file, type

  ispell -d belarusian yourfile.txt

Getting belarusian ispell dictionary working with emacs is a bit tricky.

• Copy ispell.el and ispell.elc into your $EMACSBIN/../lisp directory.

• Copy temporarily $EMACSBIN/../lisp/loaddefs.el to /usr/src/emacs-XX.X/lisp/loaddefs.el where XX.X stand for emacs version number.

• M-x-update-file-autoloads-RET and enter the path to the ispell.el.

• Copy back loaddefs.el

• Restart emacs

3.3. TeX

from Aleksey Novodvorsky:

You need TeX + babel + T2, e.g. teTeX >= 1.0. in order to get partial support for Belarusian,

• put babel.sty , belarusianb.ldf and belarusianb.sty into /usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/babel

• run texhash

• To use Belarusian in LaTeX: add the following lines in the preamble:

  \documentclass[belarusian]{article} \usepackage[cp1251]{inputenc} \usepackage{babel}

  or

  \documentclass[belarusian]{article} \usepackage[iso88595]{inputenc} \usepackage{babel}