A Shortcut to Cyrillic Classroom Texts

[Andrew Jameson]

Dear Colleagues,

The following assumes that you've Cyrillicised your PC and
are running a version of Windows. If you would like a file
on Cyrillicising Windows on a PC, drop me a line.

Ever wanted to build up a collection of Cyrillic texts in your word-
processor for use as student handouts etc.? Have you been put
off by the thought of typing it all in on your English keyboard
covered with stickers? Or wondered if a scanner could deal with
Cyrillic?

Go on the Web to www.yandex.ru (a russian search engine).

Let's say that you are looking for some poems by Blok.
Type Blok (in Cyrillic) in the search box and click start search.

You will find several sites which offer Blok's poems, listed
by title, well formatted, with notes, portraits and other goodies.

Get the desired poem on screen and use your mouse to highlight
the text (click and drag). Dvenadtsat' scrolls very slowly but you'll
get there in the end.

Drop down the File menu and click on "Save As". You will be offered
"Save As Type: HTML file". You do not want this, so, click the arrow
at the end of the box, drop down the other choice "Save As text file"
and click this.

Place this in My Documents in your chosen folder. You can give
it a name in the Roman alphabet, no problem. (If you give it a Cyrillic
name, this will appear as gobbledygook most of the time, which is
not much help.)

Disconnect from the Web, if that is relevant, and open Word. My
version is Word 7 for W95 taken from Microsoft Office and it works
just fine with Cyrillic. Later versions vary, I'm told.

Click on File, Open. You need to specify All Files to see your
Cyrillic text file, don't forget. Open this - and then use Save As again
this time clicking on save as Word.doc. The name can stay the same.

You now have the Cyrillic text in your word processor as a Word
document and can call it up, modify, annotate, print as you wish.


Andrew Jameson
Chair, Russian Committee, ALL
Languages and Professional Development
1 Brook Street, Lancaster LA1 1SL UK
Tel: 01524 32371  (+44 1524 32371)

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