International Language Support

[Glenn Thobe]

I would like help and suggestions on how to add FOREIGN ALPHABET support
to my AT&T Unix PC.  Specifically, I am interested in Russian which uses the
Cyrillic alphabet although your experience with Greek or other alphabets
would be applicable. 

As I see it, the problem is twofold:  screen display and keyboard entry.
It must be possible to display text in both alphabets simultaneously, and
the keyboard must be switchable between the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets.
In the Cyrillic mode, the keyboard layout must be the same as a standard
Russian typewriter. I would like to use vi for editing.  

I prefer to use the international standard 8-bit extended ASCII to 
represent the characters internally.  In this system, the codes 0-127 
are the usual ASCII and the codes 128-255 are used for the Cyrillic 
characters which differ from the Roman.  Extensions exist for all the 
major national alphabets.

The main questions are these:

1)	Are there Cyrillic screen fonts for the Unix PC?
2)	How are these fonts installed?
3)	How are Unix PC fonts structured?
4)	How can say the Hershey fonts be adapted to the Unix PC?
5)	How can one switch between alphabets when entering text?
6)	Do new keyboard and screen drivers have to be written?
7)	How will the stock utilities (sh, vi, more, nroff, mail, awk,
	C compiler, etc.) deal with the 8-bit international ASCII codes?
8)	Where can fonts, software, and documentation be obtained?
9)	Is this feasible?  What are the problems?

Thanks.

-Glenn Thobe
<denwa.info.com!getunx!thobe  stb!thobe at ucla-an.anes.ucla.edu>