Mac vs. PC

[Matvey B. Palchuk]

I was not a subscriber to this list, but after receiving a message from
Zenon Feszczak informing me about the Mac vs. PC discussion, I couldn't
resist...

I thoroughly enjoyed reading all the responses, especially from Max Pyziur!
I was not going to contribute at first, not that I don't have a preference,
but one of the questions is going unanswered, not to mention an opportunity
to plug my Web site yet again, so here we go:

Laura Goering was asking about Mac files created with "Moscow" font
(correct me  if I am wrong, but I am assuming that it is the same font as
one found at ftp://yftp@www-vms.uoregon.edu/fonts/russian/moscow.hqx). This
font follows the standard called "Glasnost-7" - not very common currently,
but apparently a major one on Macs a while ago. There are a number of ways
to approach the problem of converting the files in order to be able to work
with them on Windows platform, and I am going to describe one possible
solution using readily available free- and shareware resources of the
Internet below.

There are some good news and some bad news. Bad news is that it would be
difficult to be able to convert formatted text to some other standard. Good
news is that it is very easy to convert plain Glasnost-7 text into Apple
Standard Cyrillic (one of the more common Cyrillic encodings today) using
Mikhail Fridberg's excellent MacTranlit shareware
(http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/cgi-bin/NewSearch?key=MacTranslit). Save
your documents as Text Only and run them through MacTranslit configured to
convert Glasnost-7 to Apple Standard Cyrillic.

Now, since you've made the decision to convert to a Windows platform (I am
not going to say that it's a big mistake, even though I think that it is),
you will likely be working in MS Windows Cyrillic encoding - CodePage 1251.
Therefore, you'll need to do another conversion - Apple Standard Cyrillic
into CP1251. There's a multitude of software programs on Mac that would
easily handle this - just consult Wordprocessing Solutions page
(http://www.pitt.edu/~mapst57/rus/wordproc.html) of my Russification of
Macintosh Web site (http://www.pitt.edu/~mapst57/rus/russian.html) for more
information.

Should you have any specific questions on the subject, do not hesitate to
contact me.

Matvey


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 Matvey B. Palchuk, MS III       University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
 732 S. Millvale Ave. A3     mapst57 at vms.cis.pitt.edu         (412) 683-9015
 Pittsburgh, PA 15213        www.pitt.edu/~mapst57/     page: (412) 649-8646
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