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Cyrillic (Russian) in Netscape 6,7; and Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey) under MS Windows

Paul Gorodyansky 'Cyrillic (Russian): instructions for Windows and Internet'



Important!   As it was noted in the section of my site called "Russian in Browsers/Mail/News", where I list the instructions for some Internet applications, including this page about Netscape 6,7/Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey),

there is no reason to read about the tune-up for these programs if you haven't learned yet about Windows itself - Cyrillic fonts and Russian encodings. It is covered in a section of my site called "Cyrillic fonts and encodings under Windows".
That is, it's assumed that you have your Cyrillic fonts activated and become familiar with Cyrillic encodings used under MS Windows.

It's also assumed that you have Russian keyboard tools activated as described in the "Russian Keyboard" section of my site, if you are going to write in Russian in Netscape 6,7/Mozilla.



This page provides the instructions for using Russian in
Netscape ver. 6, ver. 7, and Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey):
in browser itself, in Mail/News, in the built-in HTML editor "Composer".

The settings for Cyrillic (Russian) are the same in Netscape ver. 6, ver. 7, and Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey), so below I will use a word 'Mozilla' to describe this line of products (Netscape 6,7; Firefox, Thunderbird are based on Mozilla code line anyway).



The path to Mozilla's user-specific files (Prefs.js,   Bookmarks.html) is the following:



Here are the steps (with Mozilla just being installed and closed):

1. Bookmarks

Netscape 4.x file name for the bookmarks is Bookmark.htm while new versions of Netscape as well as Mozilla use another name - Bookmarks.html.

If you have your existing Netscape 4.x Bookmark.htm with Russian items in them, then you should do the following
(Mozilla's own Import will not corrupt Russian data only if you work with a Russian version of MS Windows or if you performed Full Russification of your non-Russian Windows):


2. Suggested generic tune-up, not related to Cyrillic


 
3. Analog of Netscape 4's View / Set Default Character Set option for browser

Go to

Choose "Cyrillic(Windows-1251)".

Why? Same reason - if you go to Cyrillic Web sites a lot, it will help you to avoid switching to Cyrillic encoding manually on the sites that do not tell your browser that they are Cyrillic sites.

It will not affect browsing English sites at all - Cyrillic Character Set includes English alphabet letters, so they will be shown just fine.


4. Mail and Newsgroups - Cyrillic tune-up

If you work with Cyrillic(Russian) Mail and/or News a lot, you can choose Cyrillic encoding as Default, otherwise you can choose Cyrillic encoding manually for each message while working with an e-mail or a Newsgroup.

If you want to set such Default in Mozilla SeaMonkey or Thunderbird:



Cyrillic(KOI8-R) above - it's if you are setting Mail/News for Russian. For other Cyrillic languages, say Bulgarian, you need to check what the present preferences of that group of users are and set it to say "Cyrillic(Windows-1251)".

8-bit Russian letters in the 'body' of a message, mentioned above, are regular Cyrillic alphabet letters, they are no different from say German or French accented 8-bit letters.
There is no need to MIME-encode Cyrillic 8-bit letters in the 'body' of a message nowadays.
Also, MIME encoding makes your text 3 times bigger!
It's because each Cyrillic letter will be represented as a triage such as =D3 - three 7-bit symbols showing hexadecimal value of an 8-bit symbol.
A recipient of your message should see normal Cyrillic alphabet letters in the text of your message using View/Source and not a sequence of such triages...


 
5. Mail and Newsgroups. 2nd set of settings

These changes are made:

There do the following:


Click on Inbox folder and go to Edit/Folder Properties.
You will see that the settings made above are in effect - you will see your Cyrillic encoding as Character Encoding.

Do not check there the box "Apply for all messages" - as it was mentioned above, it will let you be flexible among various Cyrillic encodings.



If you check Properties for other folders - Sent folder, Newsgroups folders, you will also see that encoding choices you've made on the earlier steps of the tune-up are in effect.


  

6. New e-mail or Newsgroup message - Cyrillic tune-up

Cyrillic(KOI8-R) is your Default, so after you click on New, you will be presented with a composition window that lets you prepare KOI8-R message.
You can verify that: in the message preparation window do View/Character Encoding in Mozilla (SeaMonkey) or Options/Character Encoding in Thunderbird, you will see that KOI8-R is a current one.

If on earlier stages of the tune-up you did not make needed Cyrillic encoding your Default, then you will need manually select needed encoding for each Cyrillic message via View/Character Encoding in Mozilla (SeaMonkey) and Options/Character Encoding in Thunderbird and only then start typing.


7. Reply/Forward - Cyrillic tune-up

Cyrillic(KOI8-R) is your Default (set by checking Reply-related box as described above), so after you click on Reply or Forwards, you will be presented with a composition window that lets you prepare KOI8-R message.
You can verify that: in the message preparation window do View/Character Encoding in Mozilla (SeaMonkey) or Options/Character Encoding in Thunderbird, you will see that KOI8-R is a current one.

If on earlier stages of the tune-up you did not make needed Cyrillic encoding your Default for Reply/Forward modes, then you will need manually select needed encoding for each Cyrillic message via View/Character Encoding in Mozilla (SeaMonkey) and Options/Character Encoding in Thunderbird and only then start typing.


Now you know how to send Cyrillic messages correctly.

By the way, above, for both New and Reply/Forward modes, I mentioned that if on earlier stages of the tune-up you did not make needed Cyrillic encoding your Default, then you will need manually select needed encoding each time you prepare a Cyrillic message and only then start typing.

Otherwise a program will let you to type Cyrillic text just fine (because message preparation window is a Unicode window - same type as say in MS Word 2000), but it will corrupt the text on the stage of sending to Internet, if current encoding is one that does not contain Cyrillic letters (for example, "Western" - it does not have any Cyrillic):
program will make a conversion from Unicode text (UTF-16 encoding) to "Western" and each Cyrillic letter will be replaced with a '?' symbol, which means "symbol is not found in target encoding".
In such situation an author could see those question marks in the SENT folder - it's what s/he sent! The recipient would NOT be able to do anything - they are real '?' symbols and nothing else.


8. Reading some one else's messages - Cyrillic tune-up

Subject lines.

Let's discuss a Subject line with non-KOI8-R letters, that is 'foreign' letters that do not belong to the encoding that you selected as your Default, f.e. French letters while your Default is Cyrillic.

Remember, English letters are never 'foreign' - each encoding in the world, being it Cyrillic or Chinese, includes English letters.

Let's take a folder of some Newsgroup ans see what happens with messages where Subject contains such 'foreign' text - text of encoding differentr from Default one. Such 'foreign' letters in Subject field can be seen in two places - in the list of Subjects and for a current message - in the grey area in the middle of the screen.

Here situation is the same as in Outlook Express - there are two different cases:

  1. a message was sent by someone with a MIME-encoded Subject. That is, there are no normal 8-bit letters in the Subject, but a MIME string, for example, if the author, preparing a Windows-1251 message, typed Russian word "Проверка", then the Subject line arrived to your Mozilla (SeaMonkey)/Thunderbird would look like this:
    =?windows-1251?Q?=CF=F0=EE=E2=E5=F0=EA=E0?=

    You can see whether it's the case via View/MessageSource.

    In such case Mozilla (SeaMonkey)/Thunderbird already knows the encoding of the Subject's text while loading the list of Subjects because encoding is specified in that MIME string.

    Such messages will be immediately shown with readable letters both in the list of Subjects and in the grey pane for a current message - being it Windows-1251 encoding letter or any other non-Default-encoding (when default is KOI8-R) letters - such as German a-umlaut in a "Western, iso-8859-1" message.

  2. a message was sent with the Subject containing 8-bit letters 'as is', no MIME-encoding.

    Then during the loading of the list of Subjects Mozilla (SeaMonkey)/Thunderbird does not know yet what the encoding of that Subject is (until you load a 'body' of specific message by clicking on its Subject in that list) and uses Default so it assumes that each such 8-bit Subject contains KOI8-R letters (if you selected KOI8-R as Default).

    So if some Subject contains 'foreign', non-Default-encoding letters, it will not be readable in the list of Subjects - - being it Cyrillic Windows-1251 letters or German ones.

    In the grey area for a current message it's a little bit different - the 'body' of that message has been already loaded, so Mozilla (SeaMonkey)/Thunderbird knows already what the encoding is. But if you place your cursor on such message, you will not see normal letters in the Subject shown in the grey area in the middle of the - which is really a bug, error in the current Mozilla (SeaMonkey) code - BugZilla ticket 77903, but there is a work-around:
    go to View/Character Encoding and see what is the encoding selected for this message. For example, it's windows-1251 (because 'body' is marked that way - as you can see via View/Message Source). Then you just select it again - and now you will see Cyrillic letters in the Subject normally in that grey area in the middle of the screen.



    But if - rare case - a message 'body' also (not just a Subject) does not contain encoding information (no system header with MIME-information), then you will see the entire message unreadable and will need to try several encodings until you see readable text.


That is! Now you can send and receive Cyrillic messages and browse Cyrillic sites.


Paul Gorodyansky. 'Cyrillic (Russian): instructions for Windows and Internet'