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 Firefox.

Reading Web Pages in Russian


Many pages in Russian load automatically but not always. If not, in order to view a page in Russian correctly, you need to go to the "View" menu, select "Character Encoding" from the drop-down menu and choose one of the  Cyrillic options. You may have to choose "More Encodings" and "East European" to see the 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 "Character Encoding" menu is the "Unicode (UTF-8)" option. Some sites are now making use of this character set so be sure to give it a try also. This should solve all problems with merely reading a page in Russian.

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, you can read and write in a variety of codepages.

Simply make sure that you have chosen the proper "Character Encoding" 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). This is the keyboard selection menu. If you have the proper keyboard installed, you can simply click and choose. On a PC running Windows 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. ) For brief directions on how to set up fonts/keyboards go to the Windows Cyrillic page or the Mac Cyrillic page.

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

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

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