Solutions for Cyrillic layout in Mac OS X and reading old Word documents

[Larry McLellan]

Thanks you to everyone who responded to my inquiry about using Cyrillic
keyboards in Mac OS X and reading Cyrillic documents written in earlier
versions of Word.  I'd also like to thank William Koseluk, the director
of Instructional Computing at UCSB, for helping solve this problem.

Below is his summary of how both these problems can be solved.  I hope
it may prove useful to other users.

Regards,
Larry McLellan
Germanic, Slavic & Semitic Studies
UC Santa Barbara

Begin forwarded message:

>
> I tried the recently-posted solution based on resource manipulation
> (i.e., the KCHR, kcs# and kcs4 resources) and it did work!  I knew
> there was probably a solution like that, but it's been a long time
> since I worked with individual resources and I wasn't sure which ones
> to try.  This method works.  An even simpler method would have been to
> open the system file and pull out the keyboard resource - IF the old
> QWERTY Russian resource had been coded that way.  It was coded
> differently, however, so to acquire it you had to copy and paste
> resources as the previous poster suggested.
>
> However, I had found an even easier solution a couple days earlier:
> If you want to use the old Apple QWERTY keyboard layout (which is not
> quite the same as the new "Apple Standard QWERTY"), it CAN be obtained
> as part of a nice package of OS X 10.2 keyboard layouts available from
> versiontracker.com:
>
> http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/15033&vid=60274
>
> It's called "CyrilliX Lite".  It works great, and includes several
> keyboards. And it's freeware!
>
> Secondly, there is the problem of opening documents created in the old
> version of Word, with the old Cyrillic Language Kit.  The Cyrillic
> shows up as underscores.  This has been addressed before, but none of
> the solutions I saw seemed to work.  Here is one solution, albeit a
> bit roundabout:
>
> 1.  Open the old document in the OLD version of word and verify the
> font looks okay.  Change it to Latinski or the appropriate Cyrillic
> font if necessary.  (You need to have "Latinski" or the appropriate
> Cyrillic font installed in BOTH the classic (system 9) portion and the
> OS X systems if you want to view the font in both areas.)
>
> 2.  Save the document in RTF format.
>
> (at this point the NEW Word will open it, but the Cyrillic will still
> show up as a series of underscores, probably because of the unicode
> conversion vs. the older format.  I tried changing the font to other
> appropriate Cyrillic fonts as the previous poster suggested, but I
> still got underscores instead of Cyrillic characters.)
>
> 3.  I did find a curious way out:   Open this RTF in the included
> AppleWorks word processor.  It opens the RTF file and the Cyrillic
> characters survive the transfer; the characters are preserved!
>
> 4.  Finally, while you could just use Appleworks as your word
> processor, if you prefer Word:  Copy the document in AppleWorks into
> the clipboard and paste it into a new Word document and the Cyrillic
> will paste in.  The new Word document can be saved.  (Of course your
> formatting from the original version will be lost, but at least you
> don't have to retype.)
>
> I imagine there's a nicer way around, but this is one solution.
> Something in AppleWorks must decode and reencode unicode font mapping.
>  Whatever, now this user can progress on to OS X.
>

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