mysterious Eudora keyboard incident

[Paul B. Gallagher]

ameliede at EARTHLINK.NET wrote:

> Dear colleagues:
> See if you can figure this one out: Using Eudora I have never been 
> able to do Cyrillic. I can't even paste a Russian text into a blank 
> Eudora letterhead (or whatever the electronic version of an empty 
> message page is called). About an hour ago I accidentally "tripped"
> my left hand on the lower left keyboard. I probably hit some peculiar
> combination of keys--including Ctrl and ??? I did NOT see what I
> hit, but in the middle of a message I was typing I began to type
> Cyrillic. I have no idea what I did....

You don't say what operating system you're using, but if it's Windows, 
the default combination for toggling between keyboards is the left ALT 
key plus the left SHIFT key. This only works if you have set up multiple 
keyboards in the Regional Options in Control Panel. Out of the box, 
Windows is set up for only one language (in this country, US Englsh).

The system remembers which keyboard you're using for each open program, 
so you can toggle (ALT-TAB) between one program typing in English and 
another typing in Russian. When you launch a program, it begins with the 
default keyboard, which for you appears to be US English.

The standard Russian keyboard looks like this:

ц у к е н г ш щ з х ъ \
  ф ы в а п р о л д ж э
   я ч с м и т ь б ю .

So if that's what you got, it would confirm my hypothesis.

> ... I then closed Eudora and re-opened it. It no longer typed 
> Cyrillic--back to normal. I then looked in the Out mailbox to see the
> message I had sent to myself, and it was missing, gone!!! This has
> never happened. Then I went to the other mailbox where I had put the
> received self-mailed message with the alphabet, and it was there, but
> all the Cyrillic letters had been replaced by the set of Latin 
> letters with assorted diacritics that is one of the things that shows
> up when other people send messages in Russian!

What surprises me about your story is that Eudora was able to preserve 
any of this information. The Qualcomm people have had a longstanding 
animosity toward anything but plain vanilla English (and the accented 
Roman letters that come with high ASCII); if that has changed, it's news 
to me.

The substitution of high ASCII characters for the corresponding Cyrillic 
is standard practice for Eudora, which doesn't believe in any encoding 
but Western. Fortunately, those of us who do can manually select an 
appropriate Cyrillic encoding to read its deformed messages.

> So that is why I could not do a Cyrillic bee above--it's all gone as 
> mysteriously as it came, and I don't know how to get it back.

AFAIK, if you really want to do Cyrillic in email, you'll need another 
program. Modern Eudora users are welcome to correct me if I'm wrong.

-- 
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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