Cyrillic Fonts in OS X

Wed Dec 17 18:23:35 UTC 2003

Hello everyone,

This is how I've solved all my problems to date with Word, Macs, and
Cyrillic. If anyone has any better solutions, I'm eager to hear about
them.

I have been using standard Apple cyrillic fonts on my Macs for about 8
years working in Microsoft Word 6.0, 98, 2001, and now in Word for OS
X. Word started implementing unicode standards in 98 and afterwards.

Documents made with Apple's keyboards and fonts in Word 6.0 cannot be read
in later versions of Word, because Word actually encodes the letters in a
different way (implementing unicode) in and after version 98. You can use
the same fonts and keyboards in Word 98 and 2001 in OS 9.x as you used to
use back in Word 6.0 to create new documents and they work fine. But Word
98 and later is doing something different from 6.0 to encode the cyrillic
characters in your document. To work around this problem and preserve
old documents I have done two things.

1) is to make a copy of your old standard Apple cyrillic fonts and edit
them in ResEdit. After 98, Word organizes fonts by language group, so
you'll have a ton of English/Latin fonts at the top of your font list,
following by other fonts down towards the bottom, such as the CE fonts
(Times CE, Helvetica CE, etc.) for Polish/Czech/BCS, etc. and the CY fonts
(Times CY, etc. or older fonts like Bukinist, Latinskij, etc.). After 98,
Word no longer recognizes the older documents because it didn't know you
were typing in Cyrillic, it classified the same font as just another
Latin/English font. This is why your old documents turn out as underlines
in newer versions of Word. It sees that the document is in what it now
knows to be a Cyrillic font, but you didn't encode it as unicode when you
created it, so it doesn't recognize the characters as cyrillic. I don't
know what the range is, but if you open up a CY font in ResEdit, you'll
find a font id number and if you open up one of your Latin/English fonts,
you'll see a much lower font id number. I took "ER Bukinist Macintosh" and
made a copy of it. I renamed it "Bukinist". Then in ResEdit, I changed the
font ID number from "19513" TO "26". When you install "Bukinist", Word 98
and afterwards thinks it is simply another Latin/English font and
"magically" displays all your old documents if you select all text and
change the font to this new font. This preserves all your old documents
with formatting etc. and allows you to keep working with them in newer
versions of Word. But your documents are not in unicode and never will be
this way (meaning you couldn't post them to a web page or share them with
colleagues who didn't have your altered font). I've followed the same
procedure to create new versions of the CE fonts for older documents with
Polish and Czech characters.

2) you can save your old cyrillic Word documents as "text only" and then
open them in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Change the encoding in
Explorer so that you can read the cyrillic. You can then cut and paste
from Explorer to Word. Change the font to a contemporary CY font and
you've got your old text in cyrillic with unicode encoding. However,
you've left behind any formatting (bold, italics, footnotes, etc.). You
can usually reconstruct some of this with clever find/replace work
however. You can do the same thing for documents in the old CE fonts.

Why not just make a macro that would substitute new unicode characters for
the old non-unicode characters? Well, find/replace in Word hasn't allowed
unicode characters in the Replace box, so it doesn't work. (I haven't
tried this yet in Word for OS X, maybe they've fixed things).

As for fonts, I still use the same fonts and keyboards I've been using
since 1995 (if I want to). All the old standard keyboards will work in OS
X if you just make a copy of them and then add ".rsrc" to the file name.
Install in the Keyboards folder of the Library folder in OS X. I agree
with the recommendation of Matvey Palchuk's "Russkaya-AppleStd" keyboard,
which he has provided through his excellent web site in numerous versions
and updates since at least 1995.
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/rusmac/

Apple apparently no longer offers a phonetic-based keyboard with OS X, but
you can use the OS 9.x "Cyrillic-QWERTY" keyboards Apple used to provide
if you add ".rsrc" to the name. Palchuk's keyboard is the best really,
because you can type Latin/English with caps lock off, and then switch to
phonetic cyrillic with caps lock on.

As for stress marks, when I looked at the unicode tables for Russian, I
saw all kinds of odd letters (old orthographies, altered letters used for
writing non-Russian languages in cyrillic, etc.), but no simple
incorporation of stressed vowels. Based on the example mentioned in a
previous posting at: http://www.hf.uio.no/east/bulg/tests/uctest.html it
is apparently possible to combine stress with unicode fonts, but I don't
know what this would do to a document in Word or if you were searching
such a document not including the stress marks in your search. I just use
underlines or bold for marking stress in a unicode cyrillic font or I use
an older, non-standard font which did have stressed vowels and I give the
handouts to my students in hard copy or create a PDF of the document. If
people are attached to older, non-standard fonts, they may at least
console themselves with the fact that they can continue to use those old
fonts and can share PDF documents with students and colleagues for
purposes of reading and printing the documents, but they should be aware
that what they probably have is an image of a cyrillic character
substituting for plain old Latin/English character in another font and
such documents will be increasingly useless as we share across platforms
and on the web.

A final note would be to remember when sharing documents with Windows
users, that you will typically receive a document in something like "Times
New Roman", but will need to change the font to "Times CY" on the Mac (and
vice versa for transferring files to Windows). The encoding is unicode on
both platforms, but "Times New Roman" in Windows appears to be a mega-font
incorporating Cyrillic characters, Polish/Czech, etc. characters and who
knows what into one large font. In Macs, for some reason, "Times New
Roman" is just Latin/English like a normal font and you have to use Times
CE for Polish/Czech or CY for Cyrillic. Nevertheless, if you are using
unicode on one platform, it's unicode on another platform.

This is what has worked for me. I'd be happy to hear about better or
easier or more effective solutions.

Steven

Steven Clancy
University of Chicago
Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
1130 East 59th Street, Foster 406
Chicago, IL 60637

Office: (773) 702-8567
in Gates-Blake 438
Department: (773) 702-8033
Fax: (773) 702-7030
sclancy at uchicago.edu

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