Introduction

Novyi Russkii is a program for converting transliterated Russian text from Latin into Cyrillic characters and vice versa. In addition, it can convert text among the Cyrillic encodings CP 1251, KOI8, and Unicode.

The idea is that many people would like to be able to use Russian on English-based operating systems without changing the localization of the entire operating system, and without having to learn a new keyboard layout to type in Cyrillic. Novyi Russkii is for users who want to occasionally type documents, e-mail, newsgroup posts, etc. in Russian but who want to be able to use their existing keyboard setup. In order to use Novyi Russkii you will have to familiarize yourself with the transliteration system, but fortunately, it is very intuitive.

The transliteration system that Novyi Russkii uses is based on the one used by the Library of Congress. There is a wide variety of systems available, but I chose this one for its popularity and intuitiveness. Other, more specialized systems of transliteration, such as the "Academic" system, are useful for linguistic texts, but are often hard to read. The Library of Congress (LC) system was designed for use in libraries. Most American libraries have adopted the system and it is also used in many places on the Internet. Novyi Russkii’s system does not replicate the LC system completely, because the special diacrytic and ligature characters used in LC transliteration are difficult to reproduce on PCs, but their effects can be achieved with Novyi Russkii’s special codes. To see how Novyi Russkii’s and LC transliteration systems match up, see the transliteration table in this help file, and visit http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/european/lccyr.html for the official LC transliteration table.

Running Novyi Russkii

Load Novyi Russkii by double clicking its icon or by running it from the Start menu. A splash screen will be displayed to let you know that the program is beginning. Once it has loaded, an icon will appear in the system tray. Right-clicking on the icon once will bring up the program menu.

The program menu

Opening the program menu will present a list of choices:

Options	This opens a submenu where you choose your source and destination encodings. A check mark appears next to the currently selected encoding. You can also toggle the Display Status option. When checked, this displays a popup window after a conversion has been performed.
Go	This will initiate the conversion process. Make sure you have copied the data you want to convert into the clipboard and that you have selected your source and destination encodings before clicking Go. Conversion may also be performed via the program’s hot-key, Ctrl-Space. Pressing this key combination has the same effect as clicking Go, and is often more convenient.
Show Table	This will display a chart of the transliteration scheme that uses. This window is always “on top” so you can use it as a reference when typing in transliteration of Cyrillic.
Help	Opens this help file.
About...	Displays a dialog box with some information about the program.
Exit	Exits the program.

Example conversion

Open a Unicode-capable editor, such as Microsoft Word.
Set Novyi Russkii's source format to transliteration, and the destination format to Unicode.
Type Zdravstvu\ite!
Highlight the text you've typed. Press Ctrl-C to copy it to the clipboard, Ctrl-Space to do the conversion, and Ctrl-V to paste it back into your application.
The text should now be Cyrillic.
Now try to convert to another encoding:
Set the source format to Unicode, and the destination to KOI8.
Set a KOI8 font for your application (I recommend the ER Bukinist series).
Perform the conversion by pressing Ctrl-Space or clicking Go.
Paste the text back into your application.

Things to look out for

When converting from transliteration into a Cyrillic encoding, some problems can arise. For example, if you tried to convert the word detskii from transliteration to an encoding, the Russian letters 't' and 's' would not be properly recognized by Novyi Russkii. Instead, they would be interpreted together as the letter 'ts'. In the Library of Congress system, the ambiguity created by reusing Latin letters to represent different Russian letters is resolved by placing ligatures over combinations such as 'ts' and 'shch' (a ligature is not used over 'kh' and 'ch', since the Latin letter 'h' has no meaning by itself, so these cannot be misinterpreted). Novyi Russkii uses a different method to deal with ambiguities in transliterated text. In order to properly separate characters that Novyi Russkii usually interprets as combinations, you need to use an underscore ('_') character to indicate where one letter ends and another begins. The correct way to mark up detskii for transliteration is 'det_ski\i'. See Special codes to read more about marking up text.

Special codes

Novyi Russkii uses the following codes to mark up text that is to be converted from transliteration into a Cyrillic encoding:

<* … *>	Anything contained within these marks will not be transliterated.
_	Used to tell Novyi Russkii to interpret two characters separately. If you want to print an actual underscore, use <*_*>.
\E, \I, \.E	Refer to the transliteration table. The diacritics that the Library of Congress uses to represent these characters are not readily available on most computers so special codes are used to produce certain characters. Example usage: \.Etot m\ed vkusny\i.
\’, \”	Apostrophes and quotes are used to mark soft and hard signs, respectively. Hence the need for these special characters. \’ will produce an apostrophe when transliterated, and \” will produce a quote. This could also be accomplished with <*’*> and <*”*>.

Transliteration table