Russian font issue -- follow-up 2

[Paul B. Gallagher]

Benjamin Sher wrote:

> Dear friends:
>
> I've uploaded a sample page from my wife's translation to our web
> site at:
>
> http://www.websher.net/temp/kto.doc

BTW, Benjamin has corrected the case of the filename, so it really is
"kto.doc" now, not "Kto.doc."

> If anyone has had to deal with this, I would appreciate it if you
> could take a look at the page and play with it for a few minutes and
> see if there is a way to correct the font size issue so that, when
> editing the text, it aligns perfectly with the characters surrounding
> it.

 From what I can tell, the font size is not the issue. Whether you type
in ER Bukinist 1251 or Times New Roman, you're still getting 12-point
type. It just *looks* smaller because of the x-height discussed in my
earlier post.

Which brings us to the real issue -- version compatibility. From what I
can tell, this file was created using an old-style (pre-Unicode) font,
probably in Word 6 or earlier, so each character is represented by a
single byte. In those days, we had separate fonts like Arial Cyr, Arial
CE, Arial Baltic, etc., each using the same positions in the tiny
256-character code page to display different characters. Nowadays,
Unicode fonts use two or more bytes to represent each character and the
different languages use different ranges of a vast 65,000-character code
page.

The reason Word is not cooperating, I would speculate, is that it knows
Bukinist is restricted to only the Western page of the vast Unicode
space, so when you select the Russian keyboard driver, it has to
substitute a font that is defined for the Cyrillic range (remember,
Bukinist is using the Western positions to display its Cyrillic
characters instead of using the Cyrillic positions).

The best solution for the long term would be to convert this to a modern
Unicode font, and I wish I could tell you how, but I will have to rely
on someone else to offer a converter.

A less-optimal solution would be to redefine "Normal" style with an
older single-byte font such as Svoboda FWF that is already installed on
your system. In my experiments, that allowed me to type normally without
Word changing to Times New Roman, provided I typed in Russian. But the
moment I switched to the English keyboard, Word started using TNR. So in
this scenario, you'll get a slightly different appearance as you work,
and you can go and select ER Bukinist 1251 later if you prefer that
look. Of course, if you do have Bukinist installed on your system (I
don't), it might be enough to redefine "Normal" style with Bukinist
instead of TNR.

The least-optimal solution, as I see it, would be to go ahead and edit
the file ugly and make it pretty later by marking it all as ER Bukinist
1251. You will still probably have to deal with compatibility issues
when you approach a printer.

HTH

--
War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
--
Paul B. Gallagher
pbg translations, inc.
"Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
http://pbg-translations.com

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