Old Cyrillic letters in LaTeX

Question

Can one type Old Cyrillic letters using LaTeX?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet

Perhaps there is a package.

Answer 1

Some OpenType fonts support also old Cyrillic letters; compile the following with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Old Standard}

\begin{document}
\raggedright
абвгдежѕзиіклмнопрстѹф%
хѡцчшщъꙑьѣюꙗѥѧѫѩѭѯѱѳѵ

\uppercase{абвгдежѕзиіклмнопрстѹф
хѡцчшщъꙑьѣюꙗѥѧѫѩѭѯѱѳѵ}
\end{document}

I know no way to get the most ancient characters with standard LaTeX fonts. Only the characters dropped in 1917 are part of available encodings: yat, fita, izhitsa, and “decimal i” are available in the X2 encoding, and also yus. See the table of the X2 encoding, where the preference has been given to characters actually used in extensions of the modern Cyrillic alphabet.

If the font is not installed as a system font, but is included in your TeX distribution, you can load it as

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}

% if not enabled as system font
\setmainfont{OldStandard}[
  Extension=.otf,
  UprightFont=*-Regular,
  ItalicFont=*-Italic,
  BoldFont=*-Bold
]

\begin{document}
\raggedright
абвгдежѕзиіклмнопрстѹф%
хѡцчшщъ ьѣю ѥѧѫѩѭѯѱѳѵ

\uppercase{абвгдежѕзиіклмнопрстѹф
хѡцчшщъ ьѣю ѥѧѫѩѭѯѱѳѵ}
\end{document}

The TeX Live and MiKTeX distributions include the fonts; if you don't have a full install, add them with the appropriate methods: for TeX Live it is

tlmgr install oldstandard

If your TeX Live is provided by the GNU/Linux flavor package manager (say on Debian or ArchLinux or whatever), the package to install should be

texlive-fontsextra

(check the package list, the name might differ slightly).

For MiKTeX use its package manager.

Answer 2

There are packages that not only give access to letters, but also to diacritics and hyphenation.

There is a churchslavonic package in TeXlive distribution. It uses UTF document file encoding.

Also there is a package not included in LaTeX distribution, so you have to install it manually: cslTeX.

It is a pdfLaTeX + non-UTF solution (uses cp1251 or koi-8 as document encoding).