New computer, time to get off my lazy butt and Cyrillicize it. Windows deals by iteself now with reading most Cyrillic Web sites, but I want to be able to use the search function in Cyrillic for research and stuff. It drives me bonkers to find sites that are probably chock-full of useful informaiton, but have no way to access it efficiently.
Anyone have tips or software recommendations (preferably shareware or freeware) that will allow me to a) type in Russian (I don’t touch-type in English, let alone Russian, so it should be something that will allow me to see the keyboard on-screen) and b) convert text e-mail composed in Cyrillic letters, which comes out right now as garbage, into readable Russian?
There are several issues and this applies to any other character set, not just Russian:
1- Displaying web pages. The header of the HTML page will have something like “charset=windows-1251” which tells the browser what character set to use and if you do not have it then it will ask you if you want to install it. If the Web page has the header missing and the page does not display correctly then you can go to View -> Encoding and select the correct character set. This happens fairly often because the guy who made the page has that set as his default but when you go to see the page your default is a latin character set.
2- Email: pretty much same thing because, after all, Outlook Express is just part of Internet Explorer. If the email does not display correctly then go to View - Encoding and select the correct character set.
3- Typing: I do not have direct experience but I think it would be as simple as getting a Russian keyboard and selecting Russian in the keyboard properties (just like you do with a French or German keyboard. You can have a dual Russian/Ámerican keyboard with the keys marked both ways and just switch the language in windows.
BTW, I notice my computer correctly displays Russian pages and I have not expressly installed the character set support so it seems it is included in Windows as standard (unlike Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc).
If this is your case, and it probably is, all you need to do is change the keyboard properties to “Cyrillic” and then mark the keyboard keys appropriately (or have a good memory).
True enough, but a) not everyone uses Outlook; b) sometimes people send me attachments in Russian, which I can’t read unless I convert them somehow; c) I have a terrible memory for things like keyboard layouts, or pretty much anything requiring rote memorization. I once saw stickers which one could overlay onto the top half of a regular keyboard to remember the character mapping, but I haven’t seen them in a while, nor have I seen a dual-layout keyboard anytime recently.
There are 3-4 relatively standard Cyrillic keyboard layouts; some languages written in Cyrillic, like Serbian, Ukrainian, or some Turkic Central Asian languages, have letters which don’t exist in Russian. The easiest would probably be the "student"one; it corresponds more or less phonetically to the standard QWERTY keyboard, which is handy for people like me with crappy memories.
It’s not always a matter of switching the encoding; I’ve tried that.
Keyboard:
Go to Ebay, type in “keyboard russian”, and you’ll find lots of stickers and dual layout keyboards. A look at Completed Items indicates that one source regularly sells them at $22, and other sellers occasionally pop up where the keyboards go for $10-15.
Attachments:
You didn’t specify, but to me this suggests a program like Word is in use. It’s been awhile since I did this with mine, but you can select multilingual support during installation, or add that feature later - I suspect you will need the installation CD to do this.
In addition to adding pop-up trivia and insults, it will redirect your homepage to www.straightdope.com, order books and coffee mugs you could well live without, and try to undermine your social life by monpolizing your time spent on computer boards.
Cool! I poked around some more, and here’s a site with more info on Cyrillicizing a computer than anyone here probably wants to know. Different keyboard layouts, info on converting various encodings, all kinds of goodies, including an on-screen keyboard that can be used to compose Cyrillic e-mails on public computers and other places where you can’t (or don’t want to) download programs: