Using Russian on the WWW

What follows below is a brief set of directions on how to browse sites on the WWW that make use of Russian. It is primarily intended as a guide for my students, not as in-depth resource on Russification. All directions given apply to Netscape 4.0 or later.

Reading Web Pages in Russian

First, the best place to browse pages in Russian is the Language Resource Center in B. B. Comer Hall. We have some very fast machines in there which are already set up to handle Russian. If you have your own computer, make sure that it is set up properly either by reading UA's page on Russification or by checking with the sites listed on our Russites page.

In order to view a page in Russian correctly, you need to go to the "View" menu, select "Encoding" or "Character Sets" from the drop-down menu and choose one of the four Cyrillic options. Many sites are kind enough to tell you which Cyrillic encoding is used. If not, keep testing encodings until something comprehensible appears. Do note that further down the "Encoding" or "Character Sets" menu is the "Unicode (UTF-8)" option. Some sites are now making use of this encoding so be sure to give it a try also. This should solve all problems with merely reading a page in Russian.

Technical note: Occasionally the page doesn't load properly. This can be solved by making sure that your keyboard is set on a Russian keyboard. Alternately, hitting the reload button seems to solve the problem.

Typing in Russian on the WWW

This is relevant when trying to take advantage interactive exercises on the web or of materials such as on-line dictionaries. Occasionally the publisher of the materials will tell you that you need to have such and such fonts and keyboards. This is not necessarily so. If your computer is properly configured with one set of fonts and keyboards in one encoding (Apple Standard Cyrillic for the Mac and CP 1251 for PC's), you can read and write in a variety of codepages.

Simply make sure that you have chosen the proper "Encoding" or "Character Sets" option (see above section) and that you have your Russian keyboard engaged. To engage the keyboard on a Mac, look at the upper right-hand corner of your screen. You should see a US flag (or other flag) or a blue diamond. This is the keyboard selection menu. If you have the proper keyboard installed, you can simply click and choose. On a PC running Win 95 (or Win 98) the keyboard selection menu is at the bottom right-hand part of the screen. You should see either "EN" or "RU". Simply click on this and choose which option you want. (By default, this does not appear until multilingual support has been enabled. )

Once the proper encoding has been chosen and the keyboard engaged, you should be able to type with no problem.

Technical Note: some sites make use of Java or Javascript for interactive materials. Make sure that these options are enabled (see the "Preferences" menu and go to "Advanced").


This page maintained by:
Andrew M. Drozd
University of Alabama
adrozd@bama.ua.edu

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