International Vegetarian Union IVU Translations
International Vegetarian Union

How to display pages in Russian/Bulgarian (Cyrillic) and Croatian/Hungarian/Polish/Romanian (Central European)

First you need the appropriate font.

In some versions of Windows95/98 you can go to Control panel / Add-Remove Programs / Windows Setup and install the 'Multilingual Support' option from the CD. If you have that then you won't need the rest of this page....

MS Internet Explorer 5 now offers the same language support and should automatically prompt you to download, or install from your CD, when you try to access a page in another character set - provided that page has the character set defined.

If you don't have either of those option then these are True Type Fonts which will work with Windows:

Cyrillic (for Russian and Bulgarian):

Note: there are two commonly used versions of Cyrillic encoding: win1251 and KOI8-R (and a third which does not seem to be used much). All IVU/EVU files named russian.html are win1251; those named russian2.html are KOI8-R. You must use the matching font and HTML coding - if you try to read a KOI8-R page with the win 1251 font, or vice versa, you will get Cyrillic characters, but all jumbled up.

Central/Eastern European Fonts - ISO-8859-2/windows-1250 (for the Croatian/Hungarian/Polish/Romanian pages)

Save one or more of these in your windows/ sub-directory (if you get a screen with strange characters on it, just click on file / save as).
Then install the font in the normal way depending on your version of windows.

If the character set has been specified in the 'meta-line' of the page you want to read, it should appear in the correct characters once you have installed the fonts.

windows-1251 or KOI8-R is specified for some IVU/EVU pages which are primarily in Bulgarian or Russian

ISO-8859-2 is specified for IVU/EVU pages which are primarily in Romanian. windows-1250 is specified for pages in Croatian.

If it does not appear correctly then continue with this page...

To use the fonts in Netscape 3:

(For Netscape 4 skip this section and go to the next section) This could vary slightly in different versions of Netscape but should be basically similar. (It is available in Netscape 3.0 upwards but not MIE 3.0 - comments on other browers would be useful, see below)

1. Go to Options / General Preferences / Fonts.

2. In the drop down list choose Cyrillic or Cyrillic (KOI8-R) to match the font you have chosen.

3. Next to choose the proportional font click on choose font and highlight one of the fonts listed above, plus 12 or 14 point depending on your personal preference (you can easily change the size later if necessary by coming back to the same place).

4. Click on OK / OK and you should be back in Netscape.

5. Find a page in Russian/Bulgarian/Romanian/Croatian such as:
http://www.ivu.org/russian (win1251)
or http://www.ivu.org/russian/index2.html (KOI8-R)
or http://www.ivu.org/romanian (IVU Romanian)
or http://www.ivu.org/croatian (IVU Croatian)
or http://www.ivu.org/hungarian/ (IVU Hungarian)
(you will need to be able to read that page and this one at the same time - either print this one or toggle the browsers back/forward buttons)

6. Go to options /document encoding (Netscape 3) or view/encoding (Netscape 4)and click on your vchoice of language.

7. With a bit of luck your IVU/EVU page will now appear in Cyrillic/Central European characters.... You can now use options/document encoding or view/encoding to switch between your installed language and Latin1 for all Western European languages.

If anyone has any suggestions for improving the above description contact me on webmaster@ivu.org - John