This is the reply to my letter sent to Boguslav Yatskovsky. He allowed me to share it with ConTeXt users and developers. I believe it will be of some interest. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm your namesake, from Ukraine :)
:-))
I'm a member of NTG, and active user of ConTeXt. Recently I started the discussion in the mailing list about Cyrillic support with default font. When one write simple script in MKIV, like \starttext Hello world!(in different languages) \stoptext the result produced is OK, except for my language, becuase LM fonts shipped with context lacks Cyrillic.
Shame on us! About a year ago we contacted Olga Lapko and Sasha Berdnikov in this matter and -- alas -- actually nothing happened since then. Partially because of us being concentrated on providing OTF math for the Latin Modern fonts (and, later, for the TeX Gyre ones). Perhaps your email is a good occasion to improve somewhat impaired contacts? The problem in contact with us is that, as you can see, we are not especially prompt in aswering... ;-) This time, however, we've had a good reason: the problem of Cyryllic concerns also the TeX Gyre collection. We are in the midst of the action of legalization other than GPL licence (if you are interested in details, do not hesitate to ask) for the TeX Gyre fonts; we got the agreement from Han The Thanh to use his Vietnamese characters under the new licence, but -- so far -- we have not received the agreement form Valek Filippov for his Cyrillic extension. Actually, he has not answered yet to our emails (we mailed to him twice) -- we hoped to have his answer before writing to you, hence the delay... If he does not answer, or if he answers negatively, we'll have to drop out Valek's Cyrillic, and, needless to say, to think about a new one. So the problem actually concerns not only LMs, but -- probably -- also TGs.
I was advised by context gurus to request Cyrillic support in LM fonts,
Well, if we were genuine gurus, we would provide Cyryllic for LMs already ;-)
becuase is seems that this font will remain default option for long time.
Perhaps yes. Can you see how the problem of Cyrillic in LMs can be resolved? Both improvement of the glyphs from the CM-Super fonts (as far as I remember, Cyrillic glyphs were generated using Olga's sources) and generating an outline version of Olga's LH fonts (either by tracing bitmap fonts anew or manipulating -- less or more manually -- on the output produced by MetaPost run on Olga sources) seems higly time-consuming. I should think that the former method is simpler a little bit. The problem is, however, that Vladimir Volovich, similarly to Valek, released CM Super fonts on the GPL licence and it is not obvious whether he is willing to agree that somebody takes a part from his deed and works on it under another licence. Anyway, it is a lot of work! Can you see anybody that would have enough time to spend on such a task? Thank you for raising the important question -- cheers -- Jacko