FONTS AND KEYBOARDS
The
issues presented by fonts and keyboards can not be ignored by anyone who
is using computers or the Web to view or produce digital Slavic materials.
Essentially the problem can be divided into viewing characters and typing
different characters. Are you looking to display a page so it is more
readable? Or is the problem that you need to type using the characters
of a particular language?
These are related problems. You can't see the characters you type correctly if you do not have the fonts you need, or if you are looking at them with the wrong encoding. Likewise you cannot type the characters if you do not have the correct keyboard loaded. In this context, when we use the term keyboard we do not mean the piece of hardware that you type on, but rather the software that knows how the keystrokes should be displayed. There may be people on your campus who can help you with configuring your machine properly and if this is the case you are fortunate. Please note, if you are using a computer in a local area network (most business computers and public access computers are in a local area network) it may be necessary for you to contact your system's administrator to change any settings in the control panel and in some cases to download fonts. It is impossible for us to know how your network is configured, so if you are unsure what changes you can make, check with you system administrator.
Before you start there are a few terms you should be familiar with. As mentioned above, keyboard, in this context, refer to a piece of software that tells the computer how to display the keystrokes (or keystroke combinations) you've depressed. Fonts are a set of displayable or printable characters in a specific style and size. Connected to fonts are character sets. Character sets, also called encoding, are tables of numbers that correspond to characters. Some fonts only correspond to one of the character sets, hense the possible need to down load different fonts. When dealing with Slavic materials the most common character sets you will encounter are Win 1250 (also called CP-1250 and Windows Cyrillic), KOI-8, ISO-8859-2, and Unicode. Most of the problems you will encounter have to do with a lack of standardization between the character sets. Unicode is becoming a standard, and some newer computer applications translate seamlessly between Unicode and the other character sets, but the flipside is that some older programs do not understand Unicode at all.
There are several websites available that provide some very useful information about configuring your computer for multilanguage computing.
http://www.lll.uiuc.edu/multilang
This site was compiled by the Language Learning Laboratory at the University of Illinois. The instructions are very clear and it is the best place to start for basic information. The instructions are categorized by operating system, language task, and language type. The operating systems they cover are: Windows 95/98/NT/2000 and Macintosh OS9. They cover several language tasks including web browsing, sending and receiving email, and using a foreign language in Microsoft Word. The Slavic languages are all Type 2. The downfall of the site is that it does not do any trouble shooting if you have following the instructions and it still does not work. Also, it does not give instructions to download the phonetic Cyrillic keyboard. See Russify Everything or Cyrillic: Instructions for Windows and Internet for instructions on downloading the phonetic Cyrillic keyboard.
http://www.siber.com/sib/russify/
If you are looking for Cyrillic characters, this is an excellent source of information on "russifying" a computer. The site's compilers have information on handling problems for all types of computers and operating systems. The site is kept fairly current and will get you through about any problem. It will also indicate when no "fix" is available for a particular problem with Cyrillic. Some of the information here is pretty technical. However, it is worth working through this if you feel you need to use the Internet and its resources for your work. The instructions for downloading a phonetic keyboard can be found under the individual operating system pages. Please note that the site's compilers have not done this for every operating system they list.
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PaulGor/
If you are working on a PC in a Windows environment this site offers excellent information. Of note is his instructions about converting non-Unicode documents in Unicode applications (most notably MS Office 97 -- MS Office 2000 appears to do this seamlessly). This is most likely the problem if you are seeing open boxes or question marks instead of text. The instructions for downloading a phonetic keyboard is on the Russian Keyboard: standard and phonetic page.
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/rusmac/
This site offers information specifically for the Macintosh. It is one of the few out there. The site's author has provided clear and easy to understand instructions for Russifying a Macintosh.
http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~aatseel/keyboards.html
The American Association of Slavic and Eastern European Languages had put together a list of fonts and keyboard drivers you can download.
http://nl.ijs.si/gnusl/cee/iso8859-2.html
The problem can be quite complicated for the languages and characters of Eastern Europe. The lack of any standardization has really created problems. This is especially true when it comes to the issue of keyboards. Here one often finds that it is not so much that no keyboard is available. It is more common that it is almost impossible to find the characters on your keyboard once it has been loaded. This site has served as a central point for information on this problem. It is regularly updated and includes information on all the languages of Eastern Europe.
There are excellent sites available at a variety of locations beyond those listed here. This page is designed only to make scholars aware of some of the newer areas of expertise they will need to master in order to make the best use of all the sources available to them. If you are interested in learning more about Unicode check the Unicode site at http://www.unicode.org or Alan Wood's Unicode Resources at http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/unicode/index.html. Alan Wood's introduction gives a concise description of the issues involved in multilanguage computing.
