Pre-Revolutionary Russian texts

[Benjamin Sher]

Dear friends:

I have a Russian poem (Zhabotinsky's "Bednaia Sharlotta") in PDF format
which uses pre-Revolutionary orthography. It was originally published in
1902 and republished in 1930, the text from which the copy I have was
scanned by the secretary at the Zhabotinsky Institute of Tel Aviv. I
have no problem reading the text but I would like to have it in HTML
format for my web site. What do others do in this case? There is no way
to convert the PDF file to Doc or HTML or Text. I have tried using the
best tools available. That is because the issue is ultimately the
orthography itself. Is there a special Cyrillic code for
pre-Revolutionary Russian orthography? I own a program called Character
Set Converter and have written to the authors (fingertipsoft.com) asking
for their technical advice and help. I'd imagine that there are tens or
hundreds of thousands of Russian documents in the old orthography extant
and this would be a serious problem for libraries and museums and
scholars. In fact, I understand that Russian texts continued to be
published in the old orthography by Russian emigree publishers all the
way up to and perhaps even beyond World War II. Have any of you run into
this problem? If so, how do you deal with it?

Thank you all.

Benjamin

-- 
Sher's Russian Web
http://www.websher.net
Benjamin Sher
sher07 at mindspring.com

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