[Macpartners] russian font problems

[Albert Willis]

On Jan 24, 2006, at 11:32 AM, Phyllis Collymore wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I have a user with two problems:
>
> 1)  he wants to be able to read emails and documents sent to him in
> Russian.  I installed some cyrillic fonts on his computer, but we
> only seem to have access to them via "Insert Symbol" mode.  Does
> anyone know how to make the fonts be applied to Russian documents
> that might arrive on his computer?
>
> He has Powermac with OS 10.2.8, Eudora 6 and Office X

Eudora needs a plugin to deal with foreign language encoding. A  
Google search turned up a site of plugins, including Russian: http:// 
www.smi.uib.no/files/eudtab.html. Russian Word documents are going to  
be harder; you would have much better support for Russian in Office  
2004 (and Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger") than what's available in Office X  
and Mac OS X 10.2.8. If it's possible, you should have him upgrade.  
You can read about Tiger's international support at http:// 
www.apple.com/macosx/features/international/.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Apple's Mail program is  
Unicode-aware (unlike Eudora) and handles all of the languages that  
come with Mac OS X. Over the long term, that's going to be a better  
solution than Eudora, not to mention having the advantages of IMAP.

>
> 2)  his home computer can display Russian text properly, but his
> printer won't print them.  It is an HP laserjet 1200.  Anyone have
> experience with installing cyrillic fonts on one of these?


Again, if he's running an older operating system, you should probably  
upgrade him. In general, Mac OS X will print whatever is on the  
screen and printing has improved a great deal in newer versions of  
Mac OS X. I would also try printing from TextEdit or a Russian  
webpage in Safari to see if that works. Applications that began on  
Mac OS X have better support for multiple languages than those that  
originated on Mac OS 9.x and earlier operating systems.

>
> Thanks,
>
> Phyllis

   -- Al


______________________________
Albert Willis
Macintosh Platform Coordinator - Software Release Team
Client Support Services
Information Services and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
awillis at mit.edu