Cyrillic symbols with Charter font

Question

I saw many Russian mathematical books which used Charter font for both text and formulas. How can I use Charter in my pages with Cyrillic symbols?

I use

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

for Cyrillic. I tried to use Charter with instructions from font catalogue, but it didn't work because of T1 encoding.

Source (changing cp1251 to utf8 doesn't do anything good) and error is

Command \CYRR unavailiable in encoding T1.

Answer 1

Unless you find a cyrillic font based on Charter, you can't do it. The Charter font is available (on TeX Live or MiKTeX) only for the latin alphabet, so you may have to buy it and install it.

There are cyrillic fonts in TeX Live, but probably the best choice is to switch to XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX and use some system font.

A Charter font clone with support for Cyrillic is available (in OpenType format, so for XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX) at http://sourceforge.net/projects/khartiya/

UPDATE

Since June 2017, the XCharter package supports Cyrillic.

\documentclass{article}

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

\usepackage{XCharter}

\begin{document}

Либертарианские уроки \textit{Южного Парка}

\foreignlanguage{english}{Libertarian Philosophy in \textit{South Park}}

\end{document}

Answer 2

XCharter supports Cyrillic symbols. It can be used in combination with e.g. mathdesign for equations:

\documentclass{book}

\usepackage[T2A]{fontenc}   
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} 

\usepackage[bitstream-charter]{mathdesign}

\begin{document}
\fontencoding{T2A}\fontfamily{XCharter-TLF}\selectfont 
Видимое свечение чистых жидкостей под действием$\gamma$-радиации

\begin{equation}
a^2 + b^b = c^2
\end{equation}

\end{document}

For more information, please see http://mirrors.ctan.org/fonts/xcharter/doc/xcharter-doc.pdf (Section 4 is dedicated to Cyrillic)

---

Update:

with the update to version 1.1 (September 20, 2017) of xcharter, the example needs to be modified a little bit:

\documentclass{book}

\usepackage[T2A]{fontenc}   
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} 

\usepackage[bitstream-charter]{mathdesign}

\makeatletter
\newif\if@XCh@srb
\makeatother

\begin{document}
\fontencoding{T2A}\fontfamily{XCharter-TLF}\selectfont 
Видимое свечение чистых жидкостей под действием$\gamma$-радиации

\begin{equation}
a^2 + b^b = c^2
\end{equation}

\end{document}

without the additional \newif..., it will cause the error:

(/usr/local/texlive/2017/texmf-dist/tex/latex/xcharter/T2AXCharter-TLF.fd
File: T2AXCharter-TLF.fd 2017/06/25 (autoinst) Font definitions for T2A/XCharte
r-TLF.

! Extra }, or forgotten endgroup.
l.15     \edef\XCharter@@srb{\if@XCh@srb srb\fi}
                                                %
I've deleted a group-closing symbol because it seems to be
spurious, as in `$x}$'. But perhaps the } is legitimate and
you forgot something else, as in `\hbox{$x}'. In such cases
the way to recover is to insert both the forgotten and the
deleted material, e.g., by typing `I$}'.

)
! Extra \fi.
\pickup@font ...t@name \relax \define@newfont \fi