At 11:58 AM 3/6/95, Ivan A. Maximov wrote: >I would like to share my info with the rest of the people interested in >russification >of Mac software. Below please find some recommendations by >N. Saukh. > >Ivan Maximov > >P. S. I use them for Netscape and NewsWatcher. Work fine! I would like to add my two cents to the discussion... It's going to be about Macintosh, so people who don't yet see the future and use something else... ;) Nickolay Saukh is trying to accomplish te following: to make the Macintosh able to communicate with the outside world (read Russia and exUSSR) using KOI8 encoding but at the same time, keeping consistent with Apple's software, utilize Apple's Stan dard Cyrillic encoding standard locally. This means that any text orginating on your Mac is in AppleStdCyrrilic, but as you send it out, it's converted into KOI8; vice versa for the incoming text: it's in KOI8 originally, but is converted into AppleStdCyr illic as it comes in. Sounds kinda complicated? Sure does. I am writing this to clear up some potential misunderstandings in goals, methods and results of the task of Russification of the Macintosh. First, to accomplish all of this, Mr. Saukh is proposing to use ResEdit (!) and hack every application (Eudora is an exeption, see below) with conversion tables which he authored. Of course it's not such a big deal to use ResEdit, that is, if you know what you're doing... What about an average user who just bought his/her first Mac and didn't have any prior Mac programming experience? Second, the goal is to try to be able to communicate. To communicate, there's a need for a common language of some kind. KOI8 is a de-facto (as opposed to de-jure) standard of Internet communication, right? After all, what's used on Relcom? What a bout just about every Russian WWW server? E-mail? It's all KOI8. I don't want to even try to begin to figure out why would Apple suddenly think up their own, completely different character mapping scheme for their Cyrillic System (same goes for Microsoft, who'll thank them for those 866 and 1522, huh?). But if everyone out there is talking KOI8, why not talk KOI8 back as well? Makes sense? Eudora. Here the deal is a little different. Mr. Saukh submitted his Mac -> KOI8 and KOI8 -> Mac conversion tables to Qualcomm Inc., and they incorporated them into their plug-in "EudoraTables." Works like a charm, I use it all the time, and no ResEdit hacking is required whatsoever. Superb job! So what's the point of all of this? My "Russification of Macintosh" WWW server (URL:http://www.pitt.edu/~mapst57/rus/index.html) contains recommendations on using KOI8 directly on a Mac to be able to communicate on KOI8. No ResEdit use is needed, everything is within reach of an average user without too much of experience. With Eu dora, I do indeed suggest using AppleStdCyrillic. But for everything else, why go dig inside a program wit ha potentially harmful tool like ResEdit, if the results can be easily obtained by chaging Preferences configurations in majority of the cases? I would like to point out one important detail, though. The only good KOI8 font package on the internet is by Daniel A. Chirkov (Thanks!). But it's only one! It has it's problems, but overall does the job just fine. Of course, there's no compariso n with high quality Apple's fonts - they're clearly better, more complete, there's more variety, and so on. And if it's possible (Eudora example) to use them without performing a brain surgery on an application - sure, why not? Let me go through Mr. Saukh's article and point out some small details as well. Sorry for a long quote... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [...] >From: nms@kremlsun.ussr.eu.net (Nickolay Saukh) >Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm,relcom.talk,relcom.tcpip,relcom.fido.ru.networks >Subject: ANSWER: how to read/write russian (koi8-r) with Macintosh >Date: Sun, 22 Jan 1995 16:41:38 -0800 >Organization: Stalker Software Inc >Lines: 109 >Message-ID: > >NNTP-Posting-Host: crl5.crl.com >Xref: news.funet.fi comp.sys.mac.comm:69179 relcom.talk:20760 relcom.tcpip:5084 >relcom.fido.ru.networks:2939 [...] >The solutions available through the Internet (koi8 fonts, keyboards, ...) >does not allow to handle received info in natural way (IMHO). So I decided >to share my results with you. Natural is Apple? Maybe for Apple itself, but is hardly natural to go through a cascade of conversions when there's an elegant way to avoid them altogether. [...] >Email > >The only and the best (IMHO) tool is Eudora 1.5. I developed tables for handling >koi8-r and submitted it to Steve Dorner. Just follow manuals/instructions for >Eudora. Look for Eudora in > > ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/pub/quest/mac > I absiolutely agree on this one!!! >USENET news (RELCOM news) > >NewsWatcher 2.0b24: Open NewsWatcher with ResEdit and replace content >of 'taBL' resource with content of 'koi8-r taBL' file (attached below). Turn off >'collapse threads' preference. Haven't tried it with NewsWatcher, but why bother if there's Nuntius - THE best Mac newsreader not only in my opinion... And all you need is a little of Preference dialog box setting... >WWW > >Netscape 1.0N: Replace with ResEdit content of resource 128 in 'xlat' with >content >of resource 1001 in 'taBL' from file 'koi8-r taBL' (attached below). Do the same >for 129<--1002. Tried that. Made my Netscape very unstable and it was crashing and producing numerous obscure errors on me, until the hacked copy ended up in my Trash can. >MacWEB1.00A3: With tables for koi8-r it translates incoming stream from koi8-r >to Macintosh encoding, but can't show results with my fonts (some fonts >work) }-: >(for hackers: look in 'cmap'). Same argument. Why bother when MacWeb 1.0alpha2.2 does the same without ResEdit??? >Telnet > >NCSA Telnet 2.6: With ResEdit add resource 269 in 'taBL' from file 'telnet >koi8-r' >(attached below) to 'taBL' in NCSA Telnet. Do not forget to configure sessions >to use correct translation. Did not work at all. But, why bother bother if you can work with the same version (NSCA Telnet 2.6) and make it utilize KOI8? >FTP > >Fetch 2.1.2: With ResEdit replace resources 1001 and 1002 in 'taBL' with >appropriate >ones in 'taBL' from 'koi8-r taBL' file (attached below). Didn't try it, and frankly, don't know why... >Attachments > >File 'koi8-r taBL' >File 'telnet koi8-r' Those were attached in the original message. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To everyone who got to the end of this message, thanks for your attention! I would be very much interested in hearing your opinion on the issue of standards overall and KOI8 in particular. Also, what about AppleStdCyrillic and you experiences with the fon ts and other components of the Russian System 7.0.1? Your input is greatly appreciated. Matvey Palchuk P.S. I'll make available a copy of the original USENET article, both ResEdit resource files, a copy of this message, as well as any relevant replies on my WWW server. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Matvey Palchuk, MS I E-Mail: mapst57@vms.cis.pitt.edu University of Pittsburgh mapst57+@pitt.edu School of Medicine mpal@med.pitt.edu Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania URL: http://www.pitt.edu:/~mapst57/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------