Converting Cyrillic text from Windows PCs to Macintosh

Macintosh user prerequisites
Cyrillic fonts complying with the Macintosh standard. Examples:
  • Apple Cyrillic system fonts (compulsory): At least one of these:
    1. Russian System Fonts for OS 7 (may be written in Cyrillics):
      • ARSKurier (a Courier clone),
      • Bastion (sens-serif),
      •  Latinskij (a Times clone), 
      • Prjamoj, 
      • Prjamoj Prop (both Prjamojs, also spelled Priamoj, render Geneva), and 
      • Sistemnyj (Chicago);
    2. later fonts (introduced in OS 8.x, supplied with the Mac OS 9.1 Installation CD-ROM):
      • Charcoal CY,
      • Geneva CY, 
      • Helvetica CY, 
      • Monaco CY, 
      • Times CY.
  • ER-fonts (optional):
    • ER Bukinist Macintosh (a Bookman clone),
    • ER Univers Macintosh (a Helvetica clone)
  • C&G fonts (optional):
    • Bodoni Cyrillic FAF,
    • GlasnostDemiboldFAF, 
    • GlasnostExtraBoldFAF, 
    • GlasnostLightFAF, 
    • MurmanskFAF, 
    • OdessaScriptFAF, 
    • SvobodaFAF, 
    • VremyaFAF (a Times clone)

Other requirements will be listed in the individual chapters.

Purpose

This page describes procedures for converting text to the Macintosh platform from Windows computers when dealing with languages using the normal Cyrillic alphabet, i.e., Russian, Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, and the Macintosh is used by a Westerner with a language using the Roman alphabet  (West European, American [both Americas], South and Western African).

Target group

Language: non-English speakers using a Western language. In total people operating in (having the mother tongues) Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, German; French, Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Italian, Corsican; Finnish, Estonian; Albanian. Users of English, Netherlandic, Afrikaans Gaelic, Scottish, Welsh, and other languages with Roman ASCII writing will benefit as well.
Geography: in West Europe, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa
Work: working with Cyrillics and other languages of East & South East Europe
on a professional level: students, professors, translators, but also business professionals.
IT knowledge: basic text processing, beginners, computer dummies
Operating systems: Macintosh OS X (Macintosh 9.x will be dealt with in depth in later version of this page)
Wallet size: enough to own Microsoft Office for the Macintosh.

Other pages on the World Wide Web deal with this and similar issues, but I cannot help giving my own advice. It is a jungle out there.
Rivalling sites: Russification of Macintosh

Preface

Did you ever get a mail from your Russian friends that was completely illegible, despite your knowing Russian? Did the attachments render just lines instead of text? And was your Russian contact at a Windoze based PC? I was in that situation in February 2004, and I was able to read them with more or less success. In most cases, HTML conversion did the job with more or less success. Here are my solutions. 

Macintosh OS X

Prerequisites
  • Cyrillic fonts installed (cf. the above list); consult your OS Help files for font installation issues.
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer for Macintosh OS X
  • Relevant applications of Microsoft Office X

Microsoft Word documents

  1. Open the Cyrillic document in Microsoft Word X.
    If all text passages consist of lines, but numbers and interpunctuation are preserved, you must convert it into an HTML document. 
  2. Select either Menu -> File -> Save as HTML or Menu -> File -> Save as...
  3. In the dialogue window, type a name ending in .html or .htm.
  4. Make sure that the file format is HTML document.
  5. Click OK
  6. If prompted by MS Word, write a matching title for the document. Click OK

Remark
Further editing of the document cannot continue in MS Word, i.e., you cannot reopen the document in Word, believing it will be editable. You will just end up where you started. Instead, you should use a visual HTML editor.
Free visual HTML editors: Netscape | Mozilla |
Recommended payware visual HTML editors:
Macromedia Dreamweaver | Adobe GoLive |

Test the document! Open the document in your browser. The document should now be visible in all the beauty of Cyrillics.

Alternative

  1. Select Function bar -> Preview in browser.
  2. MS Word should now open the document in Internet Explorer and render the file correctly.
  3. Select Menu -> File -> Save as...
  4. In the dialogue window, type a name ending in .html or .htm.
  5. Make sure that the file format is HTML document.
  6. Click OK. You are done.

Microsoft Excel documents

Open the incoming Excel document in Microsoft Excel X.
If the text is rendered as lines (save the numbers and interpuctuation), proceed below.

  1. Select either Menu -> File -> Save as HTML or Menu -> File -> Save as...
  2. In the dialogue window, type a name ending in .html or .htm.
  3. Make sure that the file format is HTML document.
  4. Click OK
  5. If prompted by MS Word, write a matching title for the document. Click OK

Remark
MS Excel converts the spreadsheet into an xml document. It will save the figures but not the underlying formulas (if any).

Test the document! Open the document in your browser. The best results are achieved in Microsoft Internet Explorer. The browser should now display the spreadsheet in all the beauty of Cyrillics.

The document will appear in your browser with its default settings for the Cyrillic encoding. Usually, this is too big for the table cells of the spreadsheet, & you are ending up in a tabular hell with enormous characters in the limited space of the spreadsheet. So:
  1. Within the browser (example: Mozilla), select Menu -> Menu -> Settings;
  2. select Appearance -> Fonts;
  3. select Font face for -> Cyrillics;
  4. select Font -> Proportional -> Sans-serif;
  5. select Sans serif -> Geneva CY, Prjamoj Prop, Odessa Light or another sans-serif font;
  6. select Size (pixels)-> 10 pixels (if you use a 832 x 624 pixels monitor or smaller), 12 pixels (if you , most likely, use a larger monitor);
  7. click OK. The document should now appear in a normal way.

Alternatively, you can reduce the font size in the menu.

E-mail clients

E-mail clients are easier to deal with. The rule-of-a-thumb is that you must set the default font to a Cyrillic one (like Monaco CY or ARSKurier).

Microsoft Outlook Express

Outlook Express deals with the Cyrillic font issue flawlessly, and you might not even recognise any problem with correspondence in Russian, Macedonian or other languages with a Cyrillic alphabet.

Qualcomm's Eudora

The versions of Eudora in use for OS X (Eudora 5.2+) can receive and display the Cyrillic texts correctly (provided you installed the necessary fonts). For writing, though, you must change the default font into a Cyrillic one, such as Monaco CY or ARSKurier. Select the proper Cyrillic keyboard layout in the Mac OS X Menu bar for the writing. Write!

Macintosh OS 9.x

Prerequisites

Remark
Further editing of a converted Word document in Cyrillics in Macintosh OS 9 should be done in an editor or text processing program that is capable to deal with Unicoded text. This is because Word 98 converts the document into a numeric annotation of Unicode, by which each non-ASCII character gets a numeric value (hexadecimal). As told in the instruction, this encoding is not without flaws from the part of Word 98, and you might want to correct the capital letters.
There do exist word processors that are Unicode ready, and they will be added in a later version of this page.
As for now, I dare only recommend some a few HTML editors - they are guaranteed to work with Unicode, and they preserve the formatting of the original text quite well.
Free visual HTML editors: Netscape (install version 7+. It corresponds to Mozilla 1.3) | Mozilla (version/build 1.2.1 is the maximum for OS 9. Takes up about 40 MB)|
Payware visual HTML editors:
Adobe GoLive (Dreamweaver 4 is not tested positive. Microsoft Frontpage can I only warn against; at best, it writes HTML code that is erroneous according to the W3 standard [HTML 4+], at worst, it leaves your Macintosh useless.)

  • Cyrillic fonts installed (cf. the above list); consult your Macintosh OS Help files for font installation issues.
  • Relevant applications of Microsoft Office 98
  • A web browser supporting Unicode (hexadecimal): Mozilla (best for OS 9.1: build 1.2.1), Internet Explorer 4+, Netscape 6+, iCab, Opera 5+

Microsoft Word documents

Open the Cyrillic document in Microsoft Word 98. If it is rendered as lines, save the number and interpunctuation, convert it to HTML. I. e., select Menu -> Save as ... In the dialogue window, write an appropriate name, ending in .htm or .html in the Save file as... line. In the file format button, scroll down to HTML. Click OK.
Word 98 may give you an alert that it needs a Unicode converter. Try to save the file anyway.

Open the file in your browser. It should render minuscles correctly, but not the capital letters, and the quotation marks may come out funny. Readable, but not edible. For corrections, see the Remark to the right.
The bottom line: Make your Slavic contact convert the document into HTML at his/her own computer and re-mail it to you.

E-mail clients

If you installed Apple Language Kit when installing Macintosh OS 9, reading and even replying e-mail has become immesurably easier than under earlier operating systems with no Language Kit. In fact, most e-mail programs can now work well.
For more advice, check out Russification of Macintosh. The site is very helpful, but its target group is English speakers with Russian interests or Russians with an English version of their operating system. This page aids  speakers of a language with a non-ASCII West European version of the Roman alphabet, i.e., if your West European language is written with diacritics (like German), or ligatures (like Danish), you'd better stay here a bit longer.

Microsoft Outlook Express

Outlook Express deals with the Cyrillic font issue flawlessly. It converts the mails into xml code (a way to write text that picks up the best elements from text processing and HTML), which can be used for displaying and writing mail in Cyrillics.

Qualcomm's Eudora

Eudora 5.2+ can receive and display the Cyrillic texts correctly (provided you installed the necessary fonts and Apple Language Kit). For writing, though, you must change the default font into a Cyrillic one, such as Monaco CY or ARSKurier. Select the proper Cyrillic keyboard layout in the Mac OS Menu bar for the writing. Write!
If you want to read your mails in Roman languages (for example French, Norwegian, German, Portuguese), change the default font back to something familiar, such as Monaco orCourier. Answering in the Roman encoding is unproblematic, even when your screen displays Cyrillics. The recipient will see the mail with his/her favorite font.


All reference to profit and non-profit organisations on this page is deliberate and not sponsored.
This page was written on February 21, 2004.
Last update: March 29, 2004
Made on a Macintosh - with love