From: fisher@sc2a.unige.ch
Subject: Re: Russian - how to with msdos?
Organization: University of Geneva, Switzerland
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 11:07:20 GMT

In article <1992Oct23.195707.9648@nosc.mil>, medin@manta.nosc.mil (Ted Medin) writes:
> 
>  Well i have this request to write & record addresses in crylic russian :-).
> Which opens up a whole nest of snakes. What about the keyboard, screen, printer
> ... . So can someone point me to a starting point or give me a tutorial?

The problem with DOS is that the code page for russian is not defined.
Luckily, a moscovite programmer has written a set of utilities for EGA/VGA
screens the allow the editing of cyrillic languages in text mode:

	Simetl20 (or mirror) /msdos/screen/evafont.zip

You also get a keyboard driver (standard russian), which you can switch
on and off with a hot key.

This is nice, of course, but there remains the problem of printing.  Although
there are some cyrillic fonts for HP printers (don't know where, though),
you'd probably have to write a printing program, or printer driver, for it
to work properly.  The best solution would be to use a code-page aware
program, with the cyrillic code page defined, which you can do (surprise!)
with WordPerfect.

Unlike DOS, WP supports a code page 899 for russian, using the command-line
switch /CP=899.  The main advantage with WP is that you won't have to
distinguish between "CP 437" (old IBM PC standard) and "CP 899" documents,
because WP has it's own character table for cyrillic (as well as greek,
hebrew, and katakana, btw.).  Once the program from EVAFONT is installed,
simply call "wp /cp=899", and you'll find out that the EGA font mapping
is almost identical with the code page 899 (i think one character is
misplaced, but you can change that).  Now the good news: WP is also able
to print cyrillic characters on any graphical printer, even without a
downloadable font or extra font cartrige.  It might also be a good idea
to ask WP Corp. whether their russian version is available as a "language
module" (together with dictionary and thesaurus).

When the cyrillic fonts are not installed, start wp without the /cp
switch, and you'll see little blocks instead of the cyrillic characters,
even though you can see them in print preview and print them normally.
This means that even when you can't see them, WP fully supports them
(including alphabetical sort, selection, etc.).  It is only a hassle
to have to enter them by their character number, without a visual
feed back for the corrections...

Using a graphical environment, the problem of EGA font programming
dissapears.  I don't know whether Word for Windows has cyrillic characters,
but WordPerfect for Windows has them, of course.  This way, you won't
even have to load the extra video fonts, you can enter your russian
addresses directly, either using by selecting them in the character menu,
or by writing a user-defined keyboard file.  Again, it is a good idea
to check with your Windows expert whether there is a cyrillic add-on
for Windows (providing a keyboard, and possibly cyrillic characters
in other purely Windows-based word processors).

Hope this helps,

Markus Fischer    Dpt of Anthropology, Geneva CH    fisher@sc2a.unige.ch
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc