Belarusian-HOWTO
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# 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)

This configuration is for windows-1251 setup.

## 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}

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