Liviu, Thank you!
Both your's and Uwe's replies (and the LyX samples) were critical in sorting out what went wrong. For one thing, I did not quite complete the installation of the font packages. No less importantly, I was selecting 'wrong' fonts (never tried 'DejaVu Serif' before). Now all 3 converters work properly, PDF(pdflatex|luatex|xetex). Each produces a vector font. Actually, I did study all I saw on the list about the Multilingual documents. But it didn't help until I got your LyX samples. There is a huge combinatorial space of what can go wrong. And did it go, in my case. I am now slightly puzzled as to why I couldn't get the desired result via Lua and XeTeX before I installed the new Latex fonts. I did try both. And I would expect they should not depend on these fonts. Yet, the results were either errors, or missing Russian text, or bitmapped Russian. On the other hand, I no longer remember all combinations of input encodings, Latex font encodings, font selections, and PDF converters that I tried. Perhaps, that explains the difference. I also had a chance to appreciate your advice of preferring 'non-Latex fonts + PDF(luatex | xetex)' over the 'Latex fonts + pdflatex'. Indeed, the choice of beautiful fonts is way greater. And then there is no headache anymore to decide a latex font encoding. I will post the rest of my report in a reply to Uwe. With kind regards, Leonid.
