Russian in Netscape


This depends on the platform you want to run the browser on. General idea is to install the fonts first. Refer to the correspondent sections of my notes first and install the fonts. Then...

Netscape in the X Window System Environment

General

Go to "Preferences" and to "Fonts". Select "KOI8-R" encoding and choose proportional and fixed fonts of your desire. Usually, I prefer Helvetica for the proportional font and Courier for the fixed one. You can now go to any Russian city now (try, for instance, www.cityline.ru) and check whether you see normal Russian text. You might need to choose "KOI8-R" encoding in "Document Encoding" in Netscape.

Ok, now you want something more sophysticated, I guess...

Russian in the menus

This part of the client is governed by the X resources. If you installed the Cronyx family of fonts, here is what you have to add to your $HOME/.Xdefaults file. This will enable Russian letters in the menubars, bookmark entries, etc.

Dealing with ACCEPT_CHARSET

Andrei Chernov in his notes about KOI8-R mentions this problem. According to the standards an HTTP client must send valid values of ACCEPT_LANGUAGE and ACCEPT_CHRSET to the server, so server can figure out what language you want to talk on and what encoding it should sent you a page in. Starting Netscape 3.0 the client is capable of sending ACCEPT_LANGUAGE to a the server but up until Communicator 4.0 it was incapable of dealing with ACCEPT_CHARSET which made the whole thing more or less useless.
The latest version I tried was 4.0b7 and 4.02 which can be forced to handle ACCEPT_CHARSET correctly, although it is not accessable from the menu driven interface. You should edit your $HOME/.netscape/preferences.js file. Add the following line there: 
user_pref("intl.accept_charsets","koi8-r;q=1.0,iso-8859-5;q=0.9,iso-8859-1;q=0.1");
You can also either add 
user_pref("intl.accept_languages", "Russian [ru],en");
or set the latter one in the menu (this is ACCEPT_LANGUAGE). If you want to know more about this business, read the HTTP section of these notes.

Printing in Russian

There could be several solutions to this problem. It is really a problem because several standard PostScript fonts are hardwired into Netscape and there is no way you could tell it that you want to use a different set. This is something Netscape has yet to fix.
However, you can play smart and still fool them. What do you do? As I said, there could be several approaches. Here is what I do. If you will use the set of fonts I use with the ghostscript and have some sort of Hewlett Packard HP laser printer, you might find this script rather useful: 
	#!/bin/sh
	sed "s/Times-Roman/TimesNRCyrMT/g;s/Times-Bold/TimesNRCyrMT-Bold/g;\
	     s/Times-Italic/TimesNRCyrMT-Italic/g;s/Courier/CourierCyrPS/g;\
	     s/Helvetica/ArialCyrMT/g;" $* | \
	gs -q -sDEVICE=ljet4 -r600x600 -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER\
	   -dNOPLATFONTS -sOutputFile=tmp.hp -
	lpr -s tmp.hp
	rm -f tmp.hp
The script substitutes the standard PostScript fonts with those you installed, and it runs ghostscript generating the output for "Laster Jet 4" laser printer. You can even put this script in the Netscape printer dialog and just do "File"->"Print" on a page you'd like.
Very often I do some PostScript exercises before that: I want my output to be landscaped, two pages on a sheet, duplex printed. All this can be easily achieved with tools like mpage, psnup, etc.

Netscape in the MacOS environment

To be honest, I did not really dig much in this direction apart from the obvious things like installing the fonts. Read the MacOS section that describes how to install the fonts, and then just coose them in the menus of the browser.

Netscape in the Bill Gates' Kingdom

Too bad. I don't like this environment, but... Again, install the fonts as described in the correspondent part of the notes and choose them in the menus.