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:

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

Getting belarusian ispell dictionary working with emacs is a bit tricky.

3.3. TeX

from Aleksey Novodvorsky:

You need TeX + babel + T2, e.g. teTeX >= 1.0. in order to get partial support for Belarusian,