Re: Typing Cyrillic

On 20/05/2022 17:58, Harriet Bazley wrote:
> How do I type Cyrillic into Netsurf? I have the necessary fonts for
> the browser to *display* it, but I can't, for example, type a Russian
> word into a Google search box or quote a line of Russian poetry in my
> blog. (I'm pretty sure I have managed it in the past by the incredibly
> laborious technique of searching using transliterated Latin text for a
> Web page containing the relevant word in the right case and
> capitalisation and copying and pasting the text from one window to
> another, but the process is rather like trying to compose a letter from
> words cut out of the newspaper!)
>

On RISC OS 5, you can use the following (cumbersome) approach:

1. Open a Task window and enter *Country

This will output the current Country setting. (We're assuming here
that you don't have some non-standard setup where you have explicitly
configured an Alphabet and/or Keyboard the differ from the Country's
default -- if you have done so, then enter *Alphabet and *Keyboard
to obtain their current settings).

2. Enter *Country Russia in the Task Window

This will set the Country to Russia, the system alphabet (*Alphabet)
to Cyrillic and the keyboard (*Keyboard) to Russia. (If you prefer,
or have non-standard settings as described above, you can set
*Alphabet and *Keyboard explicitly instead of using *Country. Do make
sure that you set both settings, though -- the system alphabet must
be either Cyrillic or UTF8 for this to work, and you obviously need
to select the correct keyboard driver, too)

3. Press the left Alt and Shift keys together

The Russian keyboard driver has two layers, which may be switched
between by pressing the left Alt and Shift keys simultaneously. The
base layer is equivalent to a US keyboard, the alternate layer is the
Russian 104 key layout. Here we have switched to the alternate layer.

4. Type the text you want into NetSurf

The keycaps on your physical keyboard won't help you now -- you'll
need to know the layout of a Russian keyboard. If you don't, then
you can find a Drawfile containing the relevant layout at [1].

5. Press the left Alt and Shift keys together

This switches the keyboard driver back to the base layer (US layout)

6. Enter *Country <original country> in the Task Window

This sets the Country/Alphabet/Keyboard settings back to what they
were before. <original country> here is that output in step 1, above.
Again, use *Alphabet and *Keyboard instead, if these are relevant to
you.

If you think the above is unpleasant, then you would be correct.
Unfortunately, this is an excellent example of an area where RISC OS is
resolutely stuck in the 1980s. It will require significant work on the
OS itself to improve matters.

Additionally, note that the character encoding used to submit forms on
websites is determined from the web site itself (and has nothing to do
with whatever settings apply to the OS on which the browser is running).
In the case of Google, the search page they serve to NetSurf does not
specify a charset to use for form submission, so the encoding of the web
page will be used. Page -> Info will tell you that this is ISO-8859-1
(i.e. Latin 1), which is not able to represent Russian, thus you will
find that attempting to search Google for Russian text will end up with
NetSurf submitting a load of question marks, instead. Other search
engines (e.g. DuckDuckGo, Yahoo) work fine as NetSurf is able to submit
UTF-8 encoded text to those (and thus Russian is representable).


J.

1.
https://gitlab.riscosopen.org/RiscOS/Sources/Internat/IntKey/-/blob/master/Layouts/Russia,aff
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