Cutting and pasting cyrillic from web

[Steven Clancy]

I'm assuming you're pasting from a web page in Netscape to a file in
Word. There is something going on here with the way Word encodes cyrillic
and other special language characters in unicode. If you cut and paste
from the same web page in Internet Explorer, it goes into Word without
problems.

One of the real problems with the development of the Microsoft software
over the last five years or so is that everything appears to work the same
way as it used to. I use the same fonts and keyboards as I did in 1995,
but Word treats them differently than in pre-Office 98 versions. So when
you create new documents, cyrillic works fine, but when you open your old
documents you'll get underline characters that you can't do anything with.
I've gotten around this problem in two ways. One is that you can save your
old documents as text, open them in Internet Explorer, change the encoding
to Cyrillic, then paste into Word. Characters are preserved but you lose
formatting. Another thing I've done is to create a copy of some of the
fonts I use, rename them, then go into the font with ResEdit and make Word
think it is an English font and not Cyrillic by changing the ID number
associated with the font from the Cyrillic range to the English range.
Once you do this, Word no longer knows the font is Cyrillic, thinks it is
English, and then has no problems displaying your old document in
cyrillic. Basically, before Word 98, Microsoft didn't support cyrillic,
even though we all know from experience that the Mac cyrillic fonts worked
just fine. Then we they started supporting cyrillic with Unicode encoding,
it left behind all the documents created with those fonts in the regular
Macintosh encoding.

Steven



Steven Clancy
University of Chicago
Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
1130 East 59th Street, Foster 406
Chicago, IL 60637

Office: (773) 702-8567
in Gates-Blake 438
Department: (773) 702-8033
Fax: (773) 702-7030
sclancy at uchicago.edu

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