The way of typing and saving Russian texts I prefer

To type Russian texts I currently prefer Russian Virtual Keyboard by Paul Gorodyansky.

To save Russian texts to a file I currently (June 2005) prefer pasting them into a platform-dependent editor selected from this list. More specifically, I am currently using BabelPad for Windows, or Yudit for Linux for this purpose.

The following (March 2005) is preserved for mostly historical reasons.

Russian UTF-8 <=> Translit

So here comes Poor Man's Russificator, version 2, mostly for those who don't install a Russian keyboard driver for any of a variety of reasons and have situations when they don't want to use a virtual Russian keyboard, such as Yandex Virtual Keyboard.

Here are two C programs, cyr2lat.c and lat2cyr.c. cyr2lat takes UTF-8 from the standard input and produces a certain version of Translit on the standard output. lat2cyr takes this version of Translit from the standard input and produces UTF-8 on the standard output.

The main uses are: creating a Russian or mixed Russian-English text in Translit and converting it to UTF-8, or taking a Russian or mixed Russian-English text in UTF-8, converting it to Translit, editing it in Translit, and then converting it back to UTF-8.

Hence the version of Translit which I picked is less than ideal for reading, but strives to be unambiguous and also to make sure that applying first cyr2lat and then applying lat2cyr to the result produces the UTF-8 file, identical to the original one.

If you don't see Russian letters in the next paragraph, switch your browser to UTF-8.

Among the specificity of the cyr2lat output: "Y" (Ы) is represented as "W", "E hard" (Э) is represented as "Eh", "Sch" (Щ) is represented as "S#", the hard sign is represented as "Q", "Kh" (Х) is represented as "X", and the soft sign is represented as \' (upper case) and ' (lower case). Also all latin letters, quotes, and backslashes are enclosed in backquotes, and each backquote is converted to backslash-backquote.

Among the specificity of the lat2cyr interpretation of Translit are: letters "Yo", "Ya", "Yu" start from "Y", starting from "J" would yield 2 letters instead, "Ye" would yield the same result as "E", and while "W" is recommended instead of "Y" for (Ы), the use of "Y" in all other situations also would yield the same letter (Ы). The instances of "H" not busy in serving "Ch", "Sh", "Zh", and "Eh" would give the same result as "X". Backquotes toggle transliteration on and off (so enclose the English text in backquotes), except that backslash-backquote is converted into backquote and does not toggle anything.

Please feel free to use and/or modify this program as you wish --- I am not responsible for it in any manner. However, if you notice a bug or have a suggestion related to this program, its "documentation", or transliteration in general (including how to make a transliteration more convenient, while preserving the good properties described above), my address is at the end of my home page (link below).