Open Russian Text in Mac Word

[Marek Stepanek]

Have to open a Doctor Thesis in Russian, sent from a Windows XP Word
document. All I can see are ____ lines with Latin characters here and there.

On my Installation CD (German for students and teachers) are no supplemental
files for Cyrillic. Is there perhaps a downloadable version of Cyrillic
Dictionaries, fonts and encoding scripts ? Opening this file in BBEedit it
looks like unicode ... But no hint for the encoding or font used ...

Any help appreciated, have to correct these 350 pages in one week !


tx marek


ps: office for MacOS X release 1; OS 10.2.8

--
______________________________________________________________________
___PODIUM_INTERNATIONAL_//_the_embassy_for_talented_young_musicians___
_______Marek_Stepanek__mstep_[at]_PodiumInternational_[dot]_org_______
__________________http://www.PodiumInternational.org__________________
______________________________________________________________________

 

[Ramón G Castañeda]

Have to open a Doctor Thesis in Russian, sent from a Windows XP Word
document. All I can see are ____ lines with Latin characters here and there.

On my Installation CD (German for students and teachers) are no supplemental
files for Cyrillic. Is there perhaps a downloadable version of Cyrillic
Dictionaries, fonts and encoding scripts ? Opening this file in BBEedit it
looks like unicode ... But no hint for the encoding or font used ...

Any help appreciated, have to correct these 350 pages in one week !


tx marek


ps: office for MacOS X release 1; OS 10.2.8

Marek,

In order to view this in Word, you would need to make sure you installed
the appropriate 'language kit' (from Apple) when you installed OS X on your
machine. At least in some versions of OSX, maybe in all of them, you can
install the Russian language kit anytime after the installation. See if
your OS X installer (on the Apple CD) will run and let you install only the
Russian Language Kit without reinstalling the whole operating system from
scratch.

Without the language kit installed, your Mac will not show you the Cyrillic
text with a Unicode font.

Once the Russian Language Kit is installed, make sure also to select the
Russian keyboard layout.

However, the easiest solution to your immediate problem would be to ask
that the thesis file be resubmitted to you in Adobe Acrobat PDF file format.
That should be very easy to do on the PC side. Schließlich vermutet man,
daß der Doktorand sich gerne damit bemühen würde.

 

[Marek Stepanek]

Marek,

In order to view this in Word, you would need to make sure you installed
the appropriate 'language kit' (from Apple) when you installed OS X on your
machine. At least in some versions of OSX, maybe in all of them, you can
install the Russian language kit anytime after the installation. See if
your OS X installer (on the Apple CD) will run and let you install only the
Russian Language Kit without reinstalling the whole operating system from
scratch.

Without the language kit installed, your Mac will not show you the Cyrillic
text with a Unicode font.

Once the Russian Language Kit is installed, make sure also to select the
Russian keyboard layout.

However, the easiest solution to your immediate problem would be to ask
that the thesis file be resubmitted to you in Adobe Acrobat PDF file format.
That should be very easy to do on the PC side. Schließlich vermutet man,
daß der Doktorand sich gerne damit bemühen würde.

Ramón,

this was in old times of MacOS 9. OS X has Unicode support, and if I am not
wrong, Cyrillic support is installed automatically on every system ???

In any case I did not found any supplemental system installer kit for
Russian or Cyrillic like in old OS 9 times. I am already writing and reading
in Russian, so the Russian keyboard and encodings are already installed. A
simple Find "Cyrillic" on my machine is having 9 Results; for example
"Cyrillic Encodings.bundle" - "Cyrillic Encodings" etc

In shell "locate Cyrillic" is giving me an impressing list of 84 files.

My question was about Microsoft Word installation : is there a supplement
for Russian, which is not included on the Installer CD for students and
teachers ?

Thank you Ramón for your help


marek



--
______________________________________________________________________
___PODIUM_INTERNATIONAL_//_the_embassy_for_talented_young_musicians___
_______Marek_Stepanek__mstep_[at]_PodiumInternational_[dot]_org_______
__________________http://www.PodiumInternational.org__________________
______________________________________________________________________

 

[Marek Stepanek]

snip

Finally I made a big detour: first I tried with Cyclone 1.6b.1, but I did
not insisted long time. (It's a nifty tool FOR FREE, for all your encoding
probs - but need some time of playing around, because it has no encoding
sniffer, that means it can't guess which encoding your original file is
probably written in).

Then I took an other detour: I saved the Russian Word-Document.doc as
Unicode_text_only.txt and opened it in BBEdit, telling in the opening Dialog
to open it as Unicode (UTF-8) ...

Finally I can read this large text file. But I would like to correct the
text and send it back as Word-file, with all text formatting :-(

Please, please is here someone from Microsoft reading this thread, who would
be able to answer my question: is there a Russian script for Mac-Office
Word, which I have to install to open Russian text-files on MacOS X sent
from Windows XP ???


TIA marek



--
______________________________________________________________________
___PODIUM_INTERNATIONAL_//_the_embassy_for_talented_young_musicians___
_______Marek_Stepanek__mstep_[at]_PodiumInternational_[dot]_org_______
__________________http://www.PodiumInternational.org__________________
______________________________________________________________________

 

[Elliott Roper]

Finally I made a big detour: first I tried with Cyclone 1.6b.1, but I did
not insisted long time. (It's a nifty tool FOR FREE, for all your encoding
probs - but need some time of playing around, because it has no encoding
sniffer, that means it can't guess which encoding your original file is
probably written in).

Then I took an other detour: I saved the Russian Word-Document.doc as
Unicode_text_only.txt and opened it in BBEdit, telling in the opening Dialog
to open it as Unicode (UTF-8) ...

Finally I can read this large text file. But I would like to correct the
text and send it back as Word-file, with all text formatting :-(

Please, please is here someone from Microsoft reading this thread, who would
be able to answer my question: is there a Russian script for Mac-Office
Word, which I have to install to open Russian text-files on MacOS X sent
from Windows XP ???

I think you are out of luck. Word v.X unicode support is rubbish.
Unless it is one of the few unicode characters that map onto Apple's
extended 8-bit character set, unicode characters will appear as
underlines or something similar.

In previous posts on the subject, MS apologists have blamed Apple for
this. Unicode works fine with other applications like BBEdit and
InDesign on OS X.

 

[Marek Stepanek]

I think you are out of luck. Word v.X unicode support is rubbish.
Unless it is one of the few unicode characters that map onto Apple's
extended 8-bit character set, unicode characters will appear as
underlines or something similar.

In previous posts on the subject, MS apologists have blamed Apple for
this. Unicode works fine with other applications like BBEdit and
InDesign on OS X.

Thank you Eliot,

this is really disappointing ! I sent now the huge file to my brother,
working also on Windows XP. He could open it without any problem. He sent me
back this file in Rich Text format, just to see, what happens. Word for OS X
is opening this file as you guessed : the Cyrillic letters as underscores,
exactly like the original Word file, BUT TextEdit opens it without any
problem. Shame on Microsoft !!! That's really poor :-(

thank you in any case for your answer


marek



--
______________________________________________________________________
___PODIUM_INTERNATIONAL_//_the_embassy_for_talented_young_musicians___
_______Marek_Stepanek__mstep_[at]_PodiumInternational_[dot]_org_______
__________________http://www.PodiumInternational.org__________________
______________________________________________________________________

 

[Ramón G Castañeda]

Ramón,

this was in old times of MacOS 9. OS X has Unicode support, and if I am not
wrong, Cyrillic support is installed automatically on every system ???

In any case I did not found any supplemental system installer kit for
Russian or Cyrillic like in old OS 9 times. I am already writing and reading
in Russian, so the Russian keyboard and encodings are already installed. A
simple Find "Cyrillic" on my machine is having 9 Results; for example
"Cyrillic Encodings.bundle" - "Cyrillic Encodings" etc

In shell "locate Cyrillic" is giving me an impressing list of 84 files.

My question was about Microsoft Word installation : is there a supplement
for Russian, which is not included on the Installer CD for students and
teachers ?

Thank you Ramón for your help


marek

Marek,

Hmmm... I only used OS X for several dreadful months last year, through
the second release of Jaguar, but, unless my mind is playing tricks on me, I
have a distinct recollection of installing Russian language support during
the _r_e_g_u_l_a_r_ OS X installation.


Do you even see the Russian keyboard layout as an option in your setup? Do
you have the same fonts installed that your brother used on the PC? Have
you tried selecting the entire document and changing the font to one of
those you use when typing Russian? If the Russian keyboard layout is
selected, that might work.

 

[Marek Stepanek]

Marek,

Hmmm... I only used OS X for several dreadful months last year, through
the second release of Jaguar, but, unless my mind is playing tricks on me, I
have a distinct recollection of installing Russian language support during
the _r_e_g_u_l_a_r_ OS X installation.


Do you even see the Russian keyboard layout as an option in your setup? Do
you have the same fonts installed that your brother used on the PC? Have
you tried selecting the entire document and changing the font to one of
those you use when typing Russian? If the Russian keyboard layout is
selected, that might work.

thx Ramon,

no I swear on my installer CD OS X, there is no special Cyrillic Installer
kit. Yes the Russian keyboard is installed on my Laptop. I am writing
already in Russian. I really don't think, that this has something to do,
with the Operation System (MacOS X). I think, that Cyrillic support is
simply not installed in my edu-version of Word ??? Or not supported at all
on Mac ???

Thank you in any case


marek



--
______________________________________________________________________
___PODIUM_INTERNATIONAL_//_the_embassy_for_talented_young_musicians___
_______Marek_Stepanek__mstep_[at]_PodiumInternational_[dot]_org_______
__________________http://www.PodiumInternational.org__________________
______________________________________________________________________

 

[Alan Wood]

Have to open a Doctor Thesis in Russian, sent from a Windows XP Word
document. All I can see are ____ lines with Latin characters here and there.

Any help appreciated, have to correct these 350 pages in one week !

ps: office for MacOS X release 1; OS 10.2.8

You could try the new Nisus Writer Express, which should be able to work
with your Word files from Windows.

http://www.nisus.com

As other people have said, Word for Windows uses Unicode encoding for
Cyrillic (and lots of other scripts), but Word v.X does not understand this.
It only understands Cyrillic in the old MacCyrillic encoding, as used in the
OS 9 Language Kit.

 

[Marek Stepanek]

You could try the new Nisus Writer Express, which should be able to work
with your Word files from Windows.

http://www.nisus.com

As other people have said, Word for Windows uses Unicode encoding for
Cyrillic (and lots of other scripts), but Word v.X does not understand this.
It only understands Cyrillic in the old MacCyrillic encoding, as used in the
OS 9 Language Kit.

thank you Alan,

that means probably that the file saved as Windows 98 on a Windows machine
and reopen it under MacOS X could help ? At the moment I have nobody to do
it, but I will post the result for the curious lurking here in some days ...


marek


--
______________________________________________________________________
___PODIUM_INTERNATIONAL_//_the_embassy_for_talented_young_musicians___
_______Marek_Stepanek__mstep_[at]_PodiumInternational_[dot]_org_______
__________________http://www.PodiumInternational.org__________________
______________________________________________________________________

 

[Andreas Prilop]

I sent now the huge file to my brother,
working also on Windows XP. He could open it without any problem. He sent me
back this file in Rich Text format, just to see, what happens. Word for OS X
is opening this file as you guessed : the Cyrillic letters as underscores,

I don't know about Word for Mac OS X - but you can convert Cyrillic
RTF files with
<http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/cgi-bin/NewSearch?key=cyrillic+rtf>
to MacCyrillic and open with any other word processor.