Cyrillic in (La)TeX

Question

What are different ways to use Cyrillic in (La)TeX? What are their pros and cons?

Answer 1

inputenc + babel

Usage

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}

Pros

Standard — works with any LaTeX installation. One can use any encoding in .tex files. Works fine with hyperref. It works with xetex and luatex, too, provided inputenc is not loaded and the encoding is UTF-8.

Cons

With pdftex, Cyrillic letters become active symbols — so one can neither define commands with Cyrillic names nor use them in arguments of \label, \cite etc. Cyrillic letters in .aux and .toc files become unreadable.

Note
If you get this error: Unknown option 'russian'. Either you misspelled it or the language definition file francais.ldf was not found try installing the texlive-lang-cyrillic package. (source)

Answer 2

For multilingual texts with pdflatex (as opposed to using the xelatex or lualatex engines), the best option is to use the UTF-8 encoding for the input and babel:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T2A,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian,english]{babel}

\begin{document}

Text in English

\begin{otherlanguage*}{russian}
Текст на русском языке
\end{otherlanguage*}

A word and another \foreignlanguage{russian}{слово}

\end{document}

There are a number of fonts available in the T2A encoding for pdflatex:

For a wider choice, XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX are best.

Answer 3

XeLaTeX

Usage

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec} % loaded by polyglossia, but included here for transparency 
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage{russian} 
\setotherlanguage{english}

% XeLaTeX can use any font installed in your system fonts folder
% Linux Libertine in the next line can be replaced with any 
% OpenType or TrueType font that supports the Cyrillic script.

\newfontfamily\russianfont[Script=Cyrillic]{Linux Libertine}

\begin{document}
Привет
\begin{english}
Hello! 
\end{english}
\end{document}

Compile with xelatex.

Pros

Works out of the box in fresh TeX distributions. Cyrillic letters can be used freely in control sequence names, labels, etc.

Cons

One needs a pretty modern TeX distribution. (What else?)

Answer 4

Mixing Cyrillic and Latin letters

The basic idea is to use babel and inputenc (like inputenc+babel). Your document looks like:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[OT2, T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[russian, english]{babel}
\begin{document}
\foreignlanguage{russian}{Druzhba} means friendship.
\end{document}

Especially important is OT2-encoding and russian as option to babel. The command \foreignlanguage allows you to switch between English and Russian.

Pros

• You don't need a Cyrillic keyboard.
• Nearly every LaTeX system has OT2.
• babel also offers specific names e.g. for the table of contents (Содержание), table of ..

Cons

• Hyphenation does not work perfect.
• Using OT2 encoding is like a poor man's alternative to T2A

Some time ago I wrote a blog post in German: Kyrillischen Text mit LaTeX setzen

Answer 5

Using UTF-8

If you're using UTF-8, you have a Russian keyboard and you want to type only Russian texts, the best would be:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T2A]{fontenc}
\begin{document}
ЛаТеХ
\end{document}

This way you don't have to change your behaviour. Typing LaTeX texts is as easy as typing other texts. Usually you also have correct hyphenation patterns, so you can use the full feature set of LaTeX. :-)

Answer 6

Cherepanov's russlh

Usage

%&latex --tcx=koi2t2
\usepackage{russlh}

(Can be downloaded e.g. from http://www.mccme.ru/free-books/p_cher.htm.)

Pros

Cyrillic letters are \catcode'd to 11 ("letter"); thus, they can be used freely in control sequence names, labels, etc. In text files written by LaTeX (.toc, .aux, .idx, etc.) Russian letters are recoded back to their initial form, which makes these files readable and simplifies the processing of .idx files.

Cons

One has to (download and) use a non-standard package. Doesn't work with hyperref (at least not with the current version).

Answer 7

LuaLaTeX

Another modern option for Cyrillics is LuaLaTeX (with babel or polyglossia, though polyglossia still has an annoying bug and forgets to switch font family/shape sometimes).

Usage

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}

% The default Latin Modern font family doesn't contain Cyrillics,
% so load Computer Modern Unicode instead
\setmainfont{CMU Serif}[Ligatures=TeX]

\usepackage[english,russian]{babel}

\begin{document}
Привет
{\selectlanguage{english}%
Hello! 
}
\end{document}

Pros

LuaLaTeX can use any TTF or OTF font without any additional work like creating TFM an virtual fonts for pdfLaTeX.

To use a font by its name, one can just drop it into her ~/texmf/ tree and doesn't have to install it as a system font.

Since LuaTeX is a fully unicode-aware engine, one can freely mix languages, with only requirement that all the necessary glyphs are present in utilized fonts.

Auxiliary files like .aux, .toc, .idx etc. are human readable in contrast to pdfLaTeX (with inputenc). It helps with debugging index or PDF bookmarks.

Cons

Requires modern TeX distribution. For example, limits positioning for slanted math operators (like integrals) was fixed only in version 1.0 (TeXlive 2016 has 0.95).