A very common question in the fan e-mail I receive deals with Cyrillic text wordprocessing, conversion between different standards of Cyrillic encoding and cross-platform solutions. I will try to address those subjects briefly.
Cyrillic fonts come in at least 4 different flavors (standards): Apple Standard Cyrillic (ASC) - obviously, a Macintosh-native standard, KOI8 - the most popular one, pioneered on UNIX, CodePage 1251 - MS Windows standard and CodePage 866 (Alternative) - MS-DOS standard.
If you're not planning to transfer your work from Mac to, say, an IBM-compatible computer for any reason, I'd recommend to stick with Apple Standard Cyrillic fonts.
Keyboard layout you need to use has to be of the same flavor (standard) as the font you're using. For example, if you're using an Apple Standard Cyrillic font, you must be using an Apple Standard Cyrillic keyboard layout. This is key concept, be sure you understand this fully.
How do you use a keyboard layout? To type in Russian in your favorite wordprocessor, you must select (1) a Cyrillic font and (2) a corresponding keyboard layout before you start typing.
What you need to know to use the Table below:
ASC KOI8 1251 866 FONTS ASC go to ER Architect download download download download ER Bukinist download download download download ER Kurier download download download download ER Univers download download download download Nevsky go to MacAlternativa download KEYBOARD LAYOUTS Phonetic go to go to download Typewriter go to * go to ASC - Apple Standard Cyrillic
1251 - CodePage 1251, MS Windows Cyrillic encoding
866 - CodePage 866, MS-DOS (Alternative) Cyrillic encoding
* - the Russian script contains a keyboard layoutCREDITS - Apple Standard Cyrillic fonts and Russian Script are part of Russian System 7.0.1 by Apple Computer, Inc. ER series of fonts was created by Gavin Helf and adapted for the Macintosh by Zenon M. Feszczak and L. Jake Jacobson . MacAlternativa font and corresponding keyboard layouts is by L. Jake Jacobson .
If you need a refresher on how to install fonts and/or keyboard layouts on your Mac, here it is.
General advice is easy to give, but it's cheap! Being that the "other" computer you'll be interested in is likely an IBM-compatible running Windows of some sort; and further, being that CodePage 1251 is the Cyrillic encoding used in Windows; and even further, being that CP1251 fonts are available for the Mac as well (see the Table above), the advice is - just use CP1251 fonts on both your Mac and your IBM-compatible, and you'll be fine. Note, however, that there aren't any free- or shareware phonetic CP1251 keyboard layouts for the Mac - anyone out there willing to remedy this shortcoming - let me know.
Contributed by Stan Erickson:
Two versions of Microsoft Word [PC vs. Mac] use some of the higher order characters to represent some internal settings, for example, tables, formatting, whatever. These, in at least one of the two, interfere with the characters used for the Russian alphabet. I have gotten some confirmation of that from another source, who wrote that he saves his Word files as RTF, i.e., text format, and then runs them in like that to someone else's program. This apparently eliminates the character table conflicts.
Contributed by Andrew M. Drozd of U Alabama's Russification page:
When you have created your file using Cyrillic on a Mac, save it as RTF (also known as interchange format). If you are using MS Word, the file will remain open. Go to the very first line of the file, near the very beginning of the line, and look for the word "mac". Replace "mac" with "ansi" and save the document again. Put it on a DOS disk and you can call it up on a PC with all your formatting and Cyrillic text undamaged. (You may have to choose "Select All" and then choose a Cyrillic font.) The process works in reverse on a PC to Mac exchange: look for "ansi" and replace it with "mac".
The ER series of fonts for your Windows is available for downloading to your IBM-compatible computer. Keyboard drivers of interest might be:
Source of info: BRAMA Ukrainian Gateway.
While we are on the subject of fonts, let me point out that it is possible to use the TrueType fonts on both the Mac and Windows machines and, further, it is possible to convert the TrueType fonts from one platform to another, so that if you have a Windows .ttf font, for example, you can convert it into a Macintosh TrueType font. There are a couple of shareware programs out there:
Contributed by Andreas Prilop:
The conversions of TrueType fonts between MacOS and MS Windows work well
only for Latin (West European) fonts. Nothing is predictable for Cyrillic
fonts, however. The TrueType format for character encoding is very complex
(Developing
TrueType) and differently built Cyrillic TrueType fonts exist. It
might be possible to convert a Windows CP1251 TrueType font to a
Macintosh CP1251 TrueType font. But it might equally well be that the
converted font is not even recognized under MacOS.
Now on to the interconversion between the different standards of Cyrillic encodings. Here is some software that might be helpful:
Andreas also created a set of tables called Convert Cyrillic HTML to "enable you to convert HTML files written in Macintosh Cyrillic to other character sets used on the Internet: ISO-IR-111 (KOI-8), ISO-8859-5, Windows-1251, Unicode. Thereby you need to write your Cyrillic HTML files only with "native" Macintosh fonts but you can present them on the WWW in other encodings." You can download it from Info-Mac mirror.
This program converts only Russian letters (both for *.txt and *.rtf files) - non-Russian Cyrillic letters are ignored as are certain symbols like trademark. MacCyrillic and Windows-1251 clearly define the non-Russian letters also. For full-character set RTF conversion, consider Convert Cyrillic RTF by Andreas Prilop.