Viewing Russian Web pages on a Mac: Solution

[Steve Marder]

On Feb. 28, I posed the following questions:

> What must I do in order to be able to read Russian Web pages in the
> original Russian? What fonts do I need? Where do I go to get them? What
> "secrets," if any, must I be aware of in order to read Russian Web
> pages?

I went on to say that I'm using Macintosh OS 8.1 and my browser is
"Netscape Communicator 4.5".

Your response was overwhelming -- as I pretty much knew it would be! I
have tried to thank personally everyone who replied, although I beg your
indulgence if I have unwittingly overlooked any of you. I would
especially like to offer my deep appreciation to George Fowler and
Timothy Pogacar for their most helpful advice.

Let me summarize the method which works best for me and the options I
choose to make this possible:

Go to Preferences... on the Edit menu:
  1. Fonts
  2. For the Encoding: Western [Don't try to set this to "Cyrillic"
since it won't stay set; it keeps coming "unstuck"!]
  3. Variable Width Font: [Choose one of the six fonts freely
available from Apple's set of Cyrillic fonts or any other proportional
Cyrillic font which uses the standard Cyrillic coding.]
  4. Fixed Width Font: [Choose any monospaced font which uses the
standard Cyrillic coding.]
  5. It is VERY important to specify in the lower half of the Font
Preferences window the following option: "Use my fonts, overriding
page-specified fonts".

Essentially, that's the groundwork. Depending on the specific Russian
Web page you are viewing, in some cases you may not need to do ANYTHING
more. However, in many (most?) cases you will now have to go to the View
menu and select one of the following under "Character Set":
Cyrillic (KOI8-R)
Cyrillic (ISO-8859-5)
Cyrillic (Windows-1251)
Cyrillic (MacCyrillic)

Another possibility, though, is just to leave the character set on
"Western (ISO-8859-1)"! Given the specifics of a given Russian Web page,
a certain amount of experimentation is required to get the display
exactly the way it should be. Each time you change the character set,
the Web page is re-displayed.

I don't recall a single instance when I had to select one of the
following options offered on a particular Web page in order to get the
page to display properly: "KOI"  "WIN"  "MAC"

Clearly, different browsers require different solutions to get Russian
Web pages to display Cyrillic properly, and even different versions of
the SAME browser may require this. Consequently, a healthy amount of
experimentation is to be expected.

One final point: There are certain elements displayed on a Web page
which are non-dynamic and in the form of graphics. None of the above
description applies to such elements since they are not controlled by a
user's settings.

Once again, many thanks to all who responded to my plea.

Steve Marder