Converting between Mac/PC

[George Fowler]

Greetings!

Nobody has yet posted the *best* Mac-platform solution for converting
formatted word processing files between Mac and PC. This is a set of
conversion routines called Convert Cyrillic 1.6, written by Andreas Prilop,
who is active in such matters (I note his name among the acknowledgments
for the excellent telnet program Better Telnet 1.2.2, BTW). Unfortunately,
I do not have a URL to acquire this, but I have posted it to my the
anonymous ftp server running on my office Mac at:

<ftp://129.79.104.32/Methodius/Public/ConvertCyrillicRTF1.6.sit>

As far as I know, this is the latest version.

This is a set of rtf conversion filters both Mac -> Windows and Windows ->
Mac, designed to work with the shareware utilities Add/Strip and
PowerReplace, both of which should be available at any Info-Mac shareware
archive. I use the Add/Strip version, and it is impeccable.

Here's the drill for Mac -> Windows. Use only an Apple Standard Cyrillic
font, such as those available in the Apple Cyrillic Language Kit, Adobe
fonts, MacCampus fonts, ParaType fonts, etc. Create a formatted file in any
modern word processor, mixing Latin and Cyrillic freely. Now use Save As to
save it in the format rtf ("rich text format"). This converts it to a pure
text file, with formatting preserved in the form of explicit tags embedded
in the text and upper-ascii Cyrillic characters recorded as three-character
hexidecimal representations. Drop the appropriate Add/Strip filter onto the
Add/Strip utility to tell it how to convert the file, and then process the
.rtf file. This produces an equivalent rtf file with Windows Cyrillic
encoding; it is still a text file, easily transportable to a Windows
machine. Copy onto a PC-format disk. Take to Windows machine, and open
within any modern word processor (Word, Word Perfect, probably others I
don't know of). When the RTF codes are interpreted, you should get a file
in perfect Windows 1251 Cyrillic. It will probably NOT display in a
Cyrillic font, but just select one and it will display just fine, with all
or almost all formatting intact.

Windows -> Mac works exactly the same; the key is to use a standard 1251
font at the outset, and to do the conversion on the Mac side, since the
Mac, as the minority platform, is much more flexible about dealing with
foreign file formats.

The reason this is so difficult is that Windows and Mac character sets are
different. I don't have charts at hand, but here's a hypothetical scenario.
Both Windows and Mac have Western European characters such as e-acute,
c-cedilla, u-umlaut, etc., but some of them have different ascii values.
Imagine you have an a-angstrom in a Mac file, and it is at character
position 235 (I'm sure that's not correct, but I can't conveniently check
while writing this message). And suppose it is ascii 245 on Windows.
Cross-platform utilities (such as Apple's built-in PC Exchange,
MacLinkPlus, etc.) are semi-smart; they understand this difference, and
they attempt to maintain the integrity of the character when you convert
the file from Mac to PC. Thus, when you open it on the PC side, you find
the same a-angstrom character where you typed it on the Mac. Very nice! But
suppose you are using a Cyrillic font, where ascii 235 is (something like)
lower-case Cyrillic k. The OS conversion utilities don't know you are using
a Cyrillic font instead of one containing Western European diacritic, and
so they convert this character to (say) ascii 245, which is something like
Cyrillic lower-case f. Thus your file gets all screwed up.

Conversion to rtf can overcome this, because all the characters in an rtf
file are lower ascii (up to 127), which are the same on Mac/Windows, and so
they don't get converted.

I'm sure there is a more detailed and less hypothetical explanation of this
somewhere on the net, but I don't have it a URL to point to. Perhaps
someone else can do so.

George Fowler

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George Fowler                                  [Email] gfowler at indiana.edu
Dept. of Slavic Languages          [dept. tel.] 1-812-855-9906/-2608/-2624
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