On 20 May 2022 as I do recall, Paul Sprangers wrote: [snip] Hmm, that could in fact be useful for dealing with Unix software that *expects* all accented characters in configuration files to be coded in UTF8 - I've currently resorted to looking each one up individually every time I need to enter it! (I have a feeling that Zap actually handles UTF8 natively?) In fact, cutting and pasting Cyrillic text into search boxes doesn't work as expected anyway -- it displays correctly within the writable icon, but clearly isn't transmitted in a form that the remote receiver can interpret. So it's back to transliteration, which I find incredibly difficult (I keep instinctively typing B when I mean V and C when I mean S, and all the reverse mistakes that people make when trying to read Cyrillic!) -- Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie == It is far better to be deceived than to be undeceived by those we love.

On 20/05/2022 17:58, Harriet Bazley wrote: 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/maste...

On 20 May 2022 as I do recall, John-Mark Bell wrote: I wondered if using www.google.ru would work (on the assumption that this page presumably expects Russian input), but it doesn't. (Page Info gives "windows-1251", but the search result page returned then shows up as ISO-8859-1 again) And clicking on "Google offered in: russkiy" (in the absence of any ability to submit Cyrillic in e-mail!) at the bottom of the page gives an error; doing the same thing on google.de, for example, does successfully switch the page over into searching in German. -- Harriet Bazley == Loyaulte me lie == If you're feeling good, don't worry. You'll get over it.

On 30 May, John-Mark Bell wrote: If you click on "This page offered in Russian" you get an error, but changing from http to https works, -- Brian Howlett ------------------------------------------------------------------ This place would be a paradise tomorrow, if every department had a supervisor with a sub-machine gun.