🚀 go-pugleaf

Writes delusion@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Albert Schmezer):

>    Hello. I am interested in acquiring a Russian wordprocessing 
program, Shareware or PD. ........... ........... ..........
......... .......... ........... Is there ANY other Russian 
wordprocessor available besides Volga writer? If so, where can I get 
it?

Actually, there are =a lot= of Russian word processors.  Or, to be 
more accurate, there are as many Russian text editors as there are 
English text editors.  More, actually.  True word processors, 
capable of correct bilingual hyphenation and spell-checking, etc. 
are something else.  I don't know of any.

The reason for this is that what makes a Russian text editor (or a 
Greek text editor, or a Swedish text editor, etc.), is the screen 
font and the keyboard drivers peculiar to each language; the rest of 
the program is mostly common to various languages.

TEXT-BASED SYSTEMS
------------------
I am writing this reply using Qedit, my favorite MS DOS text editor.  
If I load a small TSR before starting Qedit, then Qedit becomes an 
English/Russian text editor, and shows _both_ Cyrillic and Latin 
characters onscreen, either as two files in split-screen mode or 
even mixed in the same sentence in a single file.

This is possible thanks to IBM's 255-character so-called ASCII 
character set.  There's enough room in there for a full Latin set 
PLUS a full Cyrillic set, and then some.  All you need is to remap 
part of the 255 characters to be Cyrillic ones, and you can have 
both fonts onscreen on any EGA/VGA system.  Both screen fonts are 
available simultaneously - you don't need to switch them (but you 
give up graphics characters... no line drawing).

All the usual editing functions of my Qedit editor remain the same: 
splitting and joining lines, blocking, paragraph reformatting, 
autoindenting, going-to-line, search-and-replace (you can even 
search a Cyrillic letter and replace it with a Latin character or 
viceversa), sorting, marking columns, running macros, wordwrapping, 
setting margins, printing and setting printers, setting tabs, doing 
undeleting and unkilling, etc., etc., etc... in either language.

All you need to do this is a TSR EGA/VGA Cyrillic screen font and a 
Latin/Cyrillic keyboard driver (switchable).  The screen font 
doesn't have to be switched (there is enough video memory to hold 
both fonts simultaneously), but the keyboard has to be switched from 
Latin to Cyrillic and viceversa. There even are PD TSRs that offer 
both functions in one single program. 

So you can have a bilingual screen, but the keyboard has a 
one-track-at-a-time mind.  However, in the particular case of Qedit, 
you can also enter characters of the font that is NOT switched ON at 
the keyboard by using the Alt-Numpad method, the way you would enter 
extended characters.  This is admittedly tedious, however.

PRINTING 
--------
Again, all you need is a downloadable software Cyrillic font and you 
can print beautiful Russsian text on your HP Laser Jet.  And again, 
you can do this using Qedit or any other text editor. Since the 
laser jet will print the high-ASCII characters that you are using 
onscreen to display Cyrillic letters, it means that you can print 
mixed Latin/ Cyrillic text on your HP, just as you are viewing them 
onscreen. 
                                                                
Editors specifically intended to be bilingual Cyrillic/Latin editors 
are not many.  There is the Russian-published Lexicon, a really good 
word multi-windowed processor with bilingual Menus and Help screens 
and built-in screen fonts and keyboard drivers and there is also a 
less ambitious shareware program published in the UK under the name 
of Cyril.  Cyril has more functions than the Volga Writer you 
mention, but no laser printer fonts. 

GUI SYSTEMS.  
-----------
Believe it or not, the advent of MS Windows 3.1 has brought with it 
some blessings <g>. One of them is TrueType scalable fonts. The 
other is a bundled accessory program called Windows Write.  Windows 
Write makes a wondeful multilingual text editor/word processor!  The 
fonts are scalable, the display is WYSIWYG, the keyboard can be 
remapped and the fonts will print on your HP laser jet or a 
dot-matrix printer!  And the good news gets better: there are now 
several free TrueType Cyrillic fonts, including a high-quality 
classical Cyrillic designed by Bill Tavolga and released to the 
public domain. 

NOTE: Windows 3.1 has an international keyboard driver which, if 
      installed, will automatically insert accent marks (~, ^, ', `, 
      etc.) over the vowels by entering the corresponding high-ASCII 
      character, an undocumented but very useful feature of Windows 
      3.1.  It doesn't interfere with the entry of standard English 
      text.
      
Of course, you can always run Word for Windows or some desktop 
publishing program and use the same TrueType Cyrillic fonts if you 
wanted to get more elaborate... 

                                     VP  (baka, eh?)