Thread: "Russify Computer" Getting this to work on a non-Cyrillic operating systems

Hi everyone! Back after a long hiatus and I thought I'd pick up my Russian studies in a more structured way....

I have a English Windows 8 Installation but sometimes pages in Russian are not displaying properly for me.
Also, if I download Russian music from torrent sites, the title and artist name inside iTunes looks terrible

I've seen some talk about different encodings etc, and many years ago you sometimes had to change encoding for individual non-English web pages to display correctly. But these settings are gone from browsers and I thought that was ancient history and that this would be taken care of automatically by the operating system nowadays. But I get this behaviour sometimes with Russian websites, and other non-English websites.

To show you:

Test for CP-1251(Windows) Russian fonts

The site looks like this in all browsers. I normally use Firefox. (The letters are supposed to be Cyrillic, Russian)



Sometimes when I have imported Russian music into iTunes the metadata such as title, artist name etc came out looking like the text above, and I had to spend a long time trying to figure out which song was which and fix it.

Who is able to get to the link above and get text in Russian? What are your settings?

Here are some more test pages:
http://www.kovrik.com/sib/russify/te...ssianBook.koi8
Test for KOI8-R Russian fonts


And does anyone know the fix to the iTunes problem?

Hi Hanna,

Glad you've returned.

Test page is displayed to you as if some Western encoding (such as CP-1252) is forced in your browser.
BTW, all settings in today's Firefox are where they should be:
Untitled 1.jpg

P.S. Though I know nothing about iTunes, but maybe you have to change font settings for iTunes?

I think you better get back in win 7.
Восточный проект - новости Краматорска, Украины, мира. - Microsoft признала провал Windows 8

try:
control panel > language and regional options > advanced > language for non-unicode programs > set it to Russian

that's for xp, win8 may have different terms.

Originally Posted by maxmixiv

Hi Hanna,

Glad you've returned.

Test page is displayed to you as if some Western encoding (such as CP-1252) is forced in your browser.
BTW, all settings in today's Firefox are where they should be:
Untitled 1.jpg

P.S. Though I know nothing about iTunes, but maybe you have to change font settings for iTunes?

Yes you are quite right! I had customised my Firefox so much that I didn't even have the menu anymore But I had forgotten about doing it, and assumed Firefox had removed the settings.
Once I changed the page encoding to Cyrillic, everything was fine.

Thanks for posting the helpful screenshot!

Originally Posted by sperk

try:
control panel > language and regional options > advanced > language for non-unicode programs > set it to Russian

that's for xp, win8 may have different terms.

Interesting idea! I didn't know about this... I'll try it.
I spent literally HOURS changing the titles in iTunes of some Russian rock that I downloaded. I refuse to do that again but I can't stand the ugly characters that you get when this is not working.

I made the change, but it requires a reboot, so it'll be a while until I can check it.

Originally Posted by dic

I think you better get back in win 7.
Восточный проект - новости Краматорска, Украины, мира. - Microsoft признала провал Windows 8

Yup - Windows 7 is nicer. But I already upgraded because I changed hard drive so I am stuck with Windows 8 now....

They say every other version of Windows is good..... and every other is bad. That's been correct as far as I can remember. 7 was good and 8 is bad. Looking forward to 9. I can't exactly complain though... it's not like I paid for it lol.

One day I'll change to Linux forever, but that's another story.

Originally Posted by Hanna

Sometimes when I have imported Russian music into iTunes the metadata such as title, artist name etc came out looking like the text above, and I had to spend a long time trying to figure out which song was which and fix it.

You have to convert mp3 tags from cp1251 encoding to unicode.

Originally Posted by Полуношник

You have to convert mp3 tags from cp1251 encoding to unicode.

Wow, thanks! I wish I had known this earlier!
I downloaded the whole discography of Kino a couple of years ago... I was looking for some songs that I remembered from ages back but I didn't know what they were called. I'm not even going to say how long it took me to find the songs wanted in the gargled mess that iTunes and Windows presented....

I wasn't sure at the time, if it was the person doing the encoding who had done something wrong... Or whether it was just me being stupid. Clearly it was the latter. I have a few more albums like that, so I'll have a go. Of course, it would have been helpful if he had used unicode or something... but he must have assumed everybody getting his rip either already had a Russian setup, or knew how to fix this.