On 20/05/2022 17:58, Harriet Bazley wrote:
How do I type Cyrillic into Netsurf?   I have the necessary fonts for
the browser to *display* it, but I can't, for example, type a Russian
word into a Google search box or quote a line of Russian poetry in my
blog.  (I'm pretty sure I have managed it in the past by the incredibly
laborious technique of searching using transliterated Latin text for a
Web page containing the relevant word in the right case and
capitalisation and copying and pasting the text from one window to
another, but the process is rather like trying to compose a letter from
words cut out of the newspaper!)


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/master/Layouts/Russia,aff
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