Laurent Siebenmann wrote:

>Hi Lief,
>
>Is the Mac Cyrillic Language Kit you mentioned available
>on internet independent of the huge Russian Mac OS?
>I have a "universal" version which alas is Latin only.

Since MacOS 9.0 all the language kits are available inside the MacOS Installation CD. They was also included on 8.5 and 8.6 I, but I think the Cyrillic kit was left out, for some reason. But you might be on an older system? I myself also have "Kit Cyrilique" (yes, french) which I bought for system 7.1 and upwards many years ago.

>I have hesitated to go get a Russian system as I never
>expected it would work with a western keyboard. Is it not
>designed for a keyboard on which the Cyrillic characters
>are *engraved* in parallel with Latin?

I have only tried Russian system very seldom. On my old LC 475 or COlor Classic I once tried version 7.01, which is available on the net. As for the cyrillic/latin engraved paralell keyboards I have only seen them for PC. There are free language kits however. On <http://www.macintosh.ru> they have one whose name I don't remember, but you find it there easily. They have 3-4 versions of it, for different systems. And then we have Ultimate Cyrillic Script from <http://www.macclub.spb.ru> (those people also work at FontLab). I tried both. They are quite similar, I think, but UCS is in my view more powerful.

>Quite frankly I have never seen a Mac Russian Keyboard;
>the Mac is rarissime in Russia for lack of early and
>timely promotion.

I did see some, e.g in a computing centre in Podolsk... but I did not notice how the keyboard looked like. But I assume that the keyboard doesn't matter. YOu can use any language version of the keyboard on any mac. Only trouble I've had is with USB-keyboards (from Apple and MS) on an older mac with USB-card. ON that computer only US-layout *and* (!) russian layout worked (but not russian qwerty).

>But I have seen many PC Cyrillic keyboards and they
>desperately need the engraving of both scripts; I will
>describe them briefly (next post). My guess is that the
>Russian Mac will prove quite similar.

No, I think the mac keyboards are completely language independent. Of course it can help the typer to have letters engraved, but that is another matter.

--
leif