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DISCLAIMER: All material here are a result of my personal independent research and other peoples contributions, any company I am with is not responsible for them.
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This page at http://www.nagual.pp.ru/~ache/koi8.html (original site in Moscow, Russia) is mirrored, use a near-by mirror for faster access.
Following mirrors updated daily (I hope):
See my requirements if you want to be a mirror too. Don't use any other mirrors not from this list, it means they work not right enough to be approved.
KOI8-R is a living de facto standard of Internet Mail/News exchange, WWW browsing and other interactive services in Russian spread at least all over ex-SU territory.
NOTE:
It was designed for Russian/English languages and covers only
Russian Cyrillic characters, so if you are seeking
Ukrainian, Belorussian, etc. Cyrillic characters, try
ISO-IR-111
from
ECMA
registry
instead, it matches KOI8-R in common
(letters) area.
WARNING:
RFC 1345 has the wrong definition of ISO-IR-111
(as of some other Russian character sets too, GOST_19768-74 f.e.)
so don't relay on it,
better ask for free paper copy directly from
ECMA.
<FORM> handling in your browser.
<TITLE>
pages using this
TITLE test page.
ALT= image description
before image itself becomes loaded. If your browser supports
ALT= tags charset properly, you'll see Russian
text (the same as at the image), if not - some cryptic letters.
charset= from HTTP header must overwrite charset=
from <META ...> tag.
Load this
test page
with two different HTTP header and META charsets
and try to check, what really happens. If your browser do it correctly,
you'll see KOI8-R text and not some junk in windows-1251.
Don't trust your screen mutch, better check Document Info or
Document Encoding box to see actual charset.
Cyrillic(KOI8-R) is set as
Document Encoding for old versions of Netscape
(or it is default encoding by Set Default),
most of text-oriented
Java applets works incorrectly, i.e. it looks like
<PARAM> tags
not passed to applet at all. NullPointerException becomes most
frequent error. It can be healed
by setting Document Encoding to
Western(Latin1), but it is only workaround of real bug.
Check your browser behaviour with
NewsLine applet
(among many others from
Gamelan Text applets list).
| Tests: | Font | Special Chars | FORM Input | Title | ALT= text | ACCEPT_ CHARSET |
META charset= | Text Java applets | HTTP over META |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Netscape 3.01 (MS Windows) (*) | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No | Yes | No | No |
| Netscape 4.0b2 (MS Win95) | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Netscape 3.01 (X11) (1*) | Yes | No | No | Yes (2) | Yes | No | Yes | No | No |
| Netscape 4.0b2 (X11) (*) | Yes | No | No | Yes (2) | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| MS Internet Explorer 3.02 | Yes | Yes | No | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Lynx 2.7 (3*) | N/A | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | N/A | Yes |
| Tango 2.5 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | N/A | Yes |
| Ariadna 1.2b3 | Broken (4) | Yes | Yes | Yes | N/A | No | Yes | Yes | No |
(*)
KOI8-R fonts required:
(1) additional non-standard tuning required
(2) depends on your Window Manager window titles settings
(3) text-mode browser, your terminal must have pre-loaded KOI8-R text fonts
(4) only letters area is valid, special characters are wrong
If you test other browsers, please send me results to include them here.
Standard Russian keyboard layout except Ё/ё
letters (on ~/` key)
and special characters from upper keys row.
![[HTML/HTTP]](uc3.gif)
If you do not use one of them, your document is treated as Latin1 document, i.e. default character set (ISO 8859-1) is assumed according to standards.
WARNING: Lots of people even don't bother
to follow standards, so many Russian pages written in KOI8-R and CP1251
don't have charset= attribute.
As result, some browsers
which follow standards may display them using Latin1 (ISO 8859-1)
character set, so Russian text looks completely unreadable.
Don't blame your browser in this case, but contact WWW page
author instead and ask him to fix his page using one of these
two methods.
|
Here you can find
Russian WWW pages list
which honors |
<FORM>s handling.
NOTE: All fonts below are hacked in WFWG 3.11 or Win95 sense: unlike true Cyrillic CP1251 WFWG 3.11 fonts they have KOI8-R characters in place of ISO 8859-1 characters instead of Unicode place for Russian characters.
After downloading/unzipping add them using standard Windows procedure, i.e. via Control Panel|Fonts.
ATTENTION: All keyboard switchers mentioned here (except WinKey) have CP1251 character set by default, not KOI8-R! You need to download and install corresponding keyboard descriptions from below in addition to fonts from above to tune the switchers for KOI8-R.
Recommended: ParaWin 2.0 or CyrWin 4.0 (better), both commercial.
You can find ParaWin 2.0 on Russian CD with title: Сборник программ для MICROSOFT WINDOWS, volume #1. You can find CyrWin 4.0 on the volume #3 of the same same CD line.
CyrWin 4.0 is able to switch font groups in addition to keyboards.
Netscape 3.01 (16bit)
(this browser supports KOI8-R)
| KOI8-R fonts required | Tuning | Bugs |
| KOI8-R fonts required |
ALT=
image attributes too, bug
Microsoft IE Development Team.
Forte Agent 16bit
(good Newsreader, MIME supported, KOI8-R supported)
| KOI8-R fonts and keyboard required | Tuning |
Russian KOI8-R to CP1250)
but do it incorrectly in many places (f.e. for article headers), so
I don't recommend to use this mode.
| KOI8-R fonts and keyboard required | Tuning |
| KOI8-R fonts and keyboard required |
| KOI8-R fonts and keyboard required |
| KOI8-R fonts and keyboard required |
| Win3.1 KOI8-R fonts and KOI8-R keyboard setup required |
Pegasus 2.53 (this 16bit Freeware MUA, attempts to support KOI8-R)
| Translation tables used, so only default Russian Windows support required | Tuning |
| KOI8-R fonts and keyboard required |
charset=
For Win95 Standard Edition
you need to make sure you installed Multilanguage Support. Go to
Control Panel|Add/Remove Programs,
check the Windows Setup tab and make
sure MultiLanguage Support is checked.
(It is not included with the diskette version of Win95, so if you
installed from diskettes, download
MutliLanguage Support from Microsoft).
Then choose
Russian in Control Panel|Regional Setting.
For Win95 Russian Edition and PanEuropean Edition you don't need Multilanguage support.
It seems that Win95 has stricter requirements to the fonts, it expect all font varations (i.e. Bold, Italic, Bold Italic) must exists and fonts with Normal variation only display blanks for missing variations.
If you can add something valuable to this section, please, drop me a note.
In this case you can use improved versions of standard Win95 European UNICODE fonts with Cyrillic set (Arial, Arial Black, Courier New, Impact, Times New Roman and Verdana) located at Free Truetype Windows Fonts page as KOI8-R fonts too.
BTW, there is useful tool to display additional .TTF font properties including character set and code pages into font properties dialog box, check Windows 95 font properties extension.
Using proxies you don't need KOI8-R fonts and keyboard in most cases because Windows Russian support used, but see my notes about decode tables & proxy methods.
Accept-Charset too), TELNET
supported.
ATTENTION:
this list includes only 32bit soft and since 16bit soft usually works
under Win95, look at
Win3.* Applicable Software
section too. For most of 16bit soft
GDI.EXE KOI8-R hack works too via win.ini aliases.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.02
(this browser supports KOI8-R, Russian version available too)
| Translation tables used, so only default Russian Windows support required |
ALT=
image attributes too, bug
Microsoft IE Development Team for it,
the more bug reports they
receive - the higher chances there are that they fix it.
Netscape 4.0b2 (32bit)
(this browser support KOI8-R)
| Translation tables used, so only default Russian Windows support required | Tuning | Bugs |
Netscape 3.01 (32bit)
(this browser supports KOI8-R)
| Win3.1 KOI8-R fonts or GDI.EXE KOI8-R hack (preferred) and KOI8-R keyboard setup required | Tuning | Bugs |
Tango 2.5 (this multi-lingual browser supports KOI8-R,
installation of Russian module required)
| Translation tables used, so only default Russian Windows support required |
Ariadna 1.2b3 (this browser supports KOI8-R)
| Translation tables used, so only default Russian Windows support required |
Lynx 2.7
(this console alphanumeric browser has excellent KOI8-R support)
| Console KOI8-R setup required | Tuning |
| Win3.1 KOI8-R fonts and KOI8-R keyboard setup required |
| Win3.1 KOI8-R fonts and KOI8-R keyboard setup required |
Forte Agent 32bit
(good Newsreader, MIME supported, KOI8-R supported)
| Win3.1 KOI8-R fonts or GDI.EXE KOI8-R hack (preferred) and KOI8-R keyboard setup required | Tuning |
Russian KOI8-R to CP1250)
but do it incorrectly in many places (f.e. for article headers), so
I don't recommend to use this mode.
Microsoft Internet Mail and News 1.0
(this MUA/Newsreader supports KOI8-R, Russian version available too)
| Translation tables used, so only default Russian Windows support required | Tuning |
News Xpress 2.01
(freeware newsreader, MIME attachments supported, KOI8-R supported)
| Win3.1 KOI8-R fonts or GDI.EXE KOI8-R hack (preferred) and KOI8-R keyboard setup required |
8bit and
choose KOI8-R in Character set.
See also
NewsXpress FAQ Version 2.
| Win3.1 KOI8-R fonts or GDI.EXE KOI8-R hack (preferred) and KOI8-R keyboard setup required | Tuning |
Microsoft Internet Mail and News 1.0
(this MUA/Newsreader supports KOI8-R, Russian version available too)
| Translation tables used, so only default Russian Windows support required | Tuning |
Pegasus 2.53 (this 32bit Freeware MUA, attempts to support KOI8-R)
| Translation tables used, so only default Russian Windows support required | Tuning |
| Win3.1 KOI8-R fonts or GDI.EXE KOI8-R hack (preferred) and KOI8-R keyboard setup required |
| Win3.1 KOI8-R fonts or GDI.EXE KOI8-R hack (preferred) and KOI8-R keyboard setup required |
charset=
Cyrillic (KOI8-R) and
Mail|Options|Send|Plain Text|Settings|MIME|Encode text using:
to None.
Allow 8-bit characters in headers
in the same box should be not
checked in to conform standards.
Usual place for these fonts is
/usr/{...}/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic/{100dpi,75dpi,misc}
directories set,
but if you can't modify system directories,
just put them into any directory. You need to check
that this directories are first in your FontPath:
look into
/etc/XF86Config (or similar config file
in your X11 variant) if you install them into system directory
or issue
xset +fp misc_dir,100dpi_dir,75dpi_dir
to add them locally. Use
xset q
to check they are first in FontPath.
/usr/{X386,X11R6,...}/lib/X11/.
It is needed for Netscape's Cut & Paste works for russian text.
If you can't modify system directories, put it into any directory
then set XNLSPATH environment variable to this directory.
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale.
You don't need it for
XFree86 3.2, because it already shipped with standard distribution.
Only latest X11R6 and XFree86 betas are able to enter KOI8-R keys
correctly (in terms of X11 localizations) using Cyrillic_*
keysyms, lets call it true method.
For other versions so-called
Xmodmap hacking method is available when
ISO 8859-1 keysyms cheating used to mimic KOI8-R keycodes
like ISO 8859-1 keycodes. X11 developers are strongly against this method,
so you should avoid to use it when possible.
Cyrillic_* keysyms used (f.e. in XKB mode),
but you need to apply these two patches
(patch1 (subset of R6.3 fix-01) and
patch2)
to 3.2 source code to make it working completely.
This patches will be included in future X11R6 and XFree86 releases.
WARNING:
Not all applications will work with KOI8-R keyboard,
application must be at least minimally localized according to X11R6
main strategy. To make your application minimally localized you need
to call
XtSetLanguageProc (NULL, NULL, NULL);
early in the program.
I rewrite standard Russian XKB keyboard description to procude
this
variant
which is more comfortable for me. CapsLock used here for
mode switch and Shift+CapsLock for old CapsLock function
(only in Latin mode).
If you decide to use it, place downloaded
file under
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/ru name.
To activate Russian keyboard add
XkbKeymap "xfree86(ru)"
line to "Keyboard" section of your
/etc/XF86Config configuration file.
Also check that XkbDisable is
turned off (commented) there.
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap,
then switch to/from russian (KOI8-R) keyboard
via CapsLock (after X (re)started).
I assume that you use default xinitrc or
your $HOME/.xinitrc picks .Xmodmap too.
If it doesn't work for you, enter
xmodmap /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap
directly. If you can't modify system directories, just place
the file into any directory and
call xmodmap there.
WARNING: For all Xmodmap hacking methods control keys don't work when Russian mode is active, it is a known feature.
Netscape 3.01 (X11)
(tries to support KOI8-R)
Netscape 4.0b2 (X11)
(tries to support KOI8-R)
XF-Mail
(X-Forms based MUA, MIME/POP/SMTP/IMAP4/XFaces, support KOI8-R)
$HOME/.Xdefaults file.
See also MS-Windows Mosaic tuning.
DJGPP port of Lynx2.6
(this alphanumeric browser has a good KOI8-R support,
386+ and
console KOI8-R setup
required)
For some sort of general instructions see KOI8 support in OS/2.
I don't have enough materials, please contribute to this section.
I don't have enough materials, please contribute to this section.
Programmers probably can find something useful in Cp_20866.nls resource description, but I am not sure...
Win3.* KOI8-R fonts should work with NT too. I don't know how to utilize NT's UNICODE fonts.
ATTENTION: this list includes only 32bit soft and since 16bit soft usually works under WinNT, look at Win3.* Applicable Software section too.
Lynx 2.7 (Intel)
(this console alphanumeric browser has excellent KOI8-R support)
| Console KOI8-R setup required | Tuning |
News Xpress 2.01 (Intel)
(freeware newsreader, MIME attachments supported, KOI8-R supported)
| Win3.1 KOI8-R fonts and KOI8-R keyboard setup required |
8bit and
choose KOI8-R in Character set.
See also
NewsXpress FAQ Version 2.
| Win3.1 KOI8-R fonts and KOI8-R keyboard setup required | Tuning |
Lynx 2.7
(this alphanumeric browser has excellent KOI8-R support)
MM_CHARSET to KOI8-R)
ELM-2.4ME+
(enhanced Elm Mail Agent version, MIME, PGP, remailers added)
Pine 3.96
(Mail/News Agent, many features, remote mailboxes, etc.)
Most of FreeBSD
system utilities already understand KOI8-R.
display (C)haracter set : KOI8-R character set preferred document c(H)arset : KOI8-RIf you can't see some Russian (KOI8-R) WWW page properly with Lynx, it means that the page is broken. As workaround just press '@' key in Lynx.
(S)ETUP, (C)ONFIGURE
mode set enable-8bit-esmtp-negotiations,
enable-8bit-nntp-posting and
pass-control-character-as-is.
Then select
character-set, set it to KOI8-R and
save/exit setup.
NOTE: this method works only for ESMTP-capable sendmail,
if you use another external delivery agent (via
sendmail-path= setting), you need to apply this
patch to extend
enable-8bit-esmtp-negotiations functionality
to external delivery agents called via pipe.
Pine not show Big Hard Sign 'Ъ' in some cases, use this
patch
to fix it.
~/.elm/elmrc use
charset = KOI8-R
displaycharset = KOI8-R
I don't have a Mac available, so can't comment on following materials... Use MacOS and KOI8-R and Russification of Macintosh links for more info.
Send your impressions, corrections and ideas by
E-Mail to:
Andrey A. Chernov.
Please, correct my English, if you find something written
inaccurately.
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Software rusification and this page maintaining constantly eats my time and resources... If you find this stuff useful and offer some money donation (hardware, books, girls also accepted), it allows me to intensify my efforts. E-Mail me in this case to discuss donation ways.
I want to say special thanks to people who help me to improve this page or contribute some materials, look at the list of contributors.
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