where do I get a russian language pack for my computer so I can type and read russian text?

3 Comments

1. Anonymous says:

   November 2, 2009 at 4:54 am

   Here’s how you do it:

   Start –> Control Panel –> Regional and Language Options –> Languages tab –> Make sure the top box is checked for complex scripts –> Click Details –> Then "Add" –> Select Russian from the input language list –> Click "Apply".

   You may have to restart your computer.

   From then on, your bottom taskbar will have the words "EN" on it, and you can click on it, and change it to "RU" (Russian)" or back. Once you get accustomed to it, you can make key shortcuts by right-clicking on the bottom language bar, and clicking "Settings", then "Key Settings", then changing the sequences to what you like and pressing "OK" — this is so that you can switch back quickly between languages.

   Hope this helps;
2. Daria says:

   November 2, 2009 at 4:54 am

   the above is correct for typing in russian.
   what you want to do to read your uncle’s emails is
   in internet explorer:
   top menu: view/encoding
   in firefox: view/character encoding
   and choose one.. you might need to play around with it tho, try all cyrillic first.
   sometimes i have emails coming from teh same person with differenct encodings, i cant understand why that is, but most common encodings are: koi8-R and unicode utf-8
   but like i said, definitely try multiple ones if those two do not work
3. paulgor1 says:

   November 2, 2009 at 4:54 am

   1) There is no need for any "language pack" – your computer has Russian support already. Easy to see – just go to any Russian site, say http://anekdot.ru – Russian is readable, it means that Russian is supported in the standard _fonts_ included into Windows -
   - fonts – for reading;
   - keyboard tools – for writing/typing – ether with Standard Russian layout of with Phonetic (homophonic) when Russian letters are on the buttons where similar English are:
   A-A, B-Б, D-Д, F-Ф,К-К,…

   Keyboard tools are there, just require an activation – differently done for different Windows version (2000/XP/Vista) – covered in the section
   "How to type Russian on any keyboard" on the site http://RusWin.net

   2) If Russian is already present in Fonts then why you can not read e-mails? It’s because each e-mail program (such as Outlook Express, MS Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird) and each Web-based e-mail service (such as HotMail or Gmail/Google mail) has its own rules and tune-up for non-English processing.

   Some Web-based e-mail services require just needed encoding selection in your browser as previous answer stated – while others, for example, GMail is more sophysticated and can help you to read an e-mail even if encoding selection did not help.

   Mail programs tune-up and Web services rules are covered on the section
   "Russian in Browsers/Mail" on the same site http://RusWin.net