koi8

[Max Pyziur]

>I am trying to make koi8 fonts work in Netscape on mac, and am
>encountering problems.  Love to hear from anyone who has had success
>in this area.
>
>John Dingley
>jdingley at yorku.ca


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I had the same problem with Mosaic, and what I eventually learned is that
only MacWeb can handle KOI8 fonts on the WWW. I even spoke to the Mosaic
developers, and they told me that this capacity is in the works but not yet
implemented. I got MacWeb and it works very satisfactorily. I wish the use
of KOI7 fonts in Relcom were as smooth as this.

In case you're curious, the reason for the difficulty is that most WWW
clients (and many networking programs generally) _do not transmit the
eighth bit_ of ASCII code which is supposed to be conveying text. Rather
this eighth bit is "stripped" and put to other uses by the program. KOI8,
as its name implies, requires the full eight bits, so these programs cannot
handle it. My apologies to those who really know computers for this
sophomoric explanation!

Harold D. Baker
Program in Russian
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92717 USA
1-714-824-6183/Fax 1-714-824-2379

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
This isn't true.  The two web clients-- which I've used in a
MS-windows environment -- Mosaic and Netscape -- have no problems whatsever
displaying Cyrillic properly.  It must be a function of something else
rather that the eighth bit being stripped.  If the eight bit was stripped
you would see KOI8's cousin -- KOI7 -- which appears as mostly capital letters
and some lower case ones.  In my attempts to use Netscape on a Mac the items
which are in KOI8 Cyrillic don't appear as KOI7.

For those who do use MS-Windows and either Mosaic or Netscape as a web browser
there are some fine freeware koi8 fonts in the package known as erkoi8.zip.

They are available at infomeister.osc.edu, ftp.funet.fi and
ftp.cica.indiana.edu and its mirrors.


If you are in search of some web pages which use koi8 check out
http://www.osc.edu/ukraina.html
Or if the Cyrillic scares you its bleached cousin:   8-)
http://www.osc.edu/ukraine.html

Max
pyz at panix.com
wasley_pw at simon.wustl.edu