Trouble with special cyrillic extension sign (Ge with middle hook = U+0494)

Question

The problem should be clear from the title. I have been trying to type this special character for a while. So far, anything failed. The weird this is: I can find this sign in kile right at "Cyrillic Characters" as \cyrghk. It tells me, that I need [koi8-r]inputenc, [T2C]fontenc, mathtext and [russian]{babel}, which is all I need for the standard russian characters. Actually I can type most russian characters like \cyrb and so on. It also works with [utf8]inputenc and without mathtext. I don't know why. However, I keep getting the following error message:

\cyrghk unavailable in encoding T2A. ...\cyrghk

So far, I am using "5" as a work-around, which seems to be what Yakut people do as well, when they text on smartphones, etc. Any better ideas? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can set the default encoding for the character as T2C:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T2C,T2A]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}

\DeclareTextSymbolDefault{\cyrghk}{T2C}

\begin{document}

ҕ \cyrghk

\end{document}

Don't use KOI8-R, UTF-8 is much better.

Answer 2

T2A is not T2C. If you load russian, T2A is the default encoding. You could change to T2C:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T2C]{fontenc}
\def\cyrillicencoding{T2C}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}
\begin{document} 
\cyrghk
\end{document}

or you could locally switch only for the one symbol:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}
\usepackage[T2C,T2A]{fontenc}
\begin{document}
{\fontencoding{T2C}\selectfont\cyrghk}
\end{document}

or use an unicode engine (lualatex, xelatex):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[russian]{babel}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Arial}
\begin{document}
ҕ
\end{document}