Cyrillic fonts on OS X (long summary)

[Eliot Borenstein]

First of all, I want to thank everyone who took the time to give me
advice on Cyrillic for OS X.  Interestingly enough, almost everyone
had something different to say.  So here are some of the more useful
ideas:

1) Linda Shipley suggested using the shareware browser Omniweb (which
is native for OS X, and which several of the OS X guides I've seen
praise to the skies). It can be downloaded for free, and apparently
has worked perfectly well for all her Slavic (not just Russian)
browsing.  She also installed fonts to use in Apple Works and Apple
Mail.  The Cyrillic in Apple Mail can be read only by PCs, and the
keyboard is the standard Russian layout, not the phonetic,
Latin-friendly one.

The issue of keyboards quickly proved to be central, as you can see
from some of the other suggestions.

2) Rachel Platonov has been browsing the Web with Explore 5.1 and
been able to read her Cyrillic sites.  She also installed Cyrillic II
fonts, which is of particular interest to me, since I also use
Cyrillic II.  However, she also writes:

        "The process of making OS X Cyrillic-friendly (at least for
me) was not entirely straightforward, however, primarily because OS X
lacks a phonetic keyboard layout for Cyrillic. Furthermore, because
of the way OS X is designed --Apple does not supply end-users with
the necessary information for Root access to allow changes to the
system--I had to do quite a bit of online research on my own in order
to figure out how to install a phonetic keyboard layout; Apple's
website was useless in this respect. I don't remember all of the
details off the top of my head, but I can probably resurrect them if
need be."

Obviously, this is rather complicated.  What I gathered from some
sources is that you need to install these sorts of third-party fonts
in Classic, and then somehow you get access to them in OS X.

3) Alexandra Leontieva suggested that an OS X version of Dialect
(made by the people who make Unispell) might be available by now on
www.textar.ru.  I have not checked out this possibility.

4) Anne Eakin Moss installed xRussify Mac 1.0,which is available on
http://macintosh.ru/crussify/.  It successfully installed Russian
keyboards for Word, etc., but caused minor glitches in OSX.  To
overcome these problems, she reinstalled OSX (which did not cause her
to lose any information or fonts).  She says that apparently, if you
install the fonts right after a fresh install of the OS (before
installing anything else), this problem won't arise.  Of course, that
means that you actually have to know you want to do this before you
start installing other things, or end up doing a re-install.  Also,
she has not been able to have access to a phonetic/transliterated
keyboard.  Browsing has worked for her, although, in Explorer, she's
had to switch back and forth between Character Sets in the View menu
sometimes.

5)  Jack Franke found xRussy Mac 1.0 to be even more troublesome than
Anne Eakin Moss did; it crashed his system and caused the apple icon
to disappear from the corner.  He downloaded CyrilliX 1.0 from
www.download.com (I found it by searching for Cyrillix 1.0) and
installed it.  He highly recommends it.  I also downloaded and
installed it.  The first time I messed around with keyboard menus,
all the commands in all my menus disappeared, but after I restarted,
it worked quite well.  The fonts support Russian, Ukrainian, and
Bulgarian, and there is a phonetic keyboard available for the
Russian.  It works just fine.  As far as I can tell, it installs just
one Russian font, but I am hoping that this means I can install
others and use them with the Cyrillix phonetic keyboard.  So of all
the options I've yet seen, this seems like the best one so far.

Jack Franke also noted that the May 2002 issue of MacAddict (#69) has
an article on making your Mac multilingual, with Cyrillic examples
(pp. 76-79).

I hope this has been useful.  If anyone has more information, I'd welcome it.

Eliot Borenstein
Russian & Slavic Studies
New York University

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