Import Russian text into FM 7.1, please advice

[walrusit]

Dear professionals

From our Russian agent I received some MS-Word documents in the Russian language.

I wanted to import the Cyrillic text / characters into Framemaker documents to make a structured book.

But copying and pasting makes Frame only show question marks.

Selecting an other font did not show anything else.

What is the simpelest way of making Frame "eat" the Cyrillic MS-Word text and make a proper structured document.

I read already things about "font mappings", but haven't the faintest "clou" about how to do such a thing.

Al this on a Win-XP system and Frame version 7.1p116.

Font Arial CYR and others available in the Paragraph Designer.

Your advice will be appreciated.

Regards,

Wolter

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

My only guess would be Unicode vs. non-Unicode formatting of the source doc. I think FM7.1 doesn't handle Unicode character sets. Try the demo of FM9 & see if it imports them clearly.

[Michael_Müller-Hillebrand · Accepted solution]

Wolter,

You have to transform the text into the Cyrillic codepage. Codepage is a term describing a set of max. 256 characters (encodable with a single byte). With Western Windows we use the codepage 1252, for Cyrillic text codepage 1251 is necessary.

Without rebooting etc. you may want to proceed like this:

* Open the document with Word

* File > Save as Text (there might be two options, we need the option which allows to set the encoding)

* Select "Windows (Russian)" or something with "1251" from the encoding popup menu. If the document contains any characters that do not fit into this encoding, it will tell you.

* Save as txt file.

Now you can import this file into FrameMaker, if asked for an encoding, use Windows — FrameMaker 7.x does not know anything about Cyrillic etc., only when you apply a font like Arial CYR (which is a codepage subset of Arial) the correct glyphs will appear.

HTH,

- Michael

[walrusit]

Thanks Michael,

This did the trick.

All I have to do afterwards is give the text the correct structure.

Looks superb.

Regards,

Wolter