Word processor documents

Once you have configured your computer to write Ukrainian text, you can produce documents wholly or partly in Ukrainian using word processing software such as recent versions of Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect.

If you open a document containing Ukrainian text produced on someone else’s computer, whether or not you will be able to read the text will depend on the software on the other computer. If you have a recent version of Microsoft Word, for example, in most cases you should be able to read documents with Ukrainian text produced by these programs as soon as you open them. This is because the program automatically tries to detect the encoding scheme which was used to produce the document.

If you open a document and the encoding scheme is not detected automatically, your program may have a facility for manually selecting the approriate encoding. Microsoft Word 2003, for example, provides the File Conversion tool for this purpose (see “Troubleshoot encoded text files” in the program’s Help section). Alternatively, there are several conversion tools on the web which you may find useful (see the Links page).

In many cases the exchange of documents between different programs can be facilitated by using the Rich Text Format (RTF). When producing a document with Ukrainian text, therefore, you may increase the likelihood that it will be readable on another computer by saving it as an RTF file. Conversely, if you are unable to read a document produced by someone else, you could ask them to re-save it as an RTF file.

The same applies to the Portable Document Format (PDF) which can be read using the free Adobe Reader program, although additional software is required to save a document as a PDF file. Note also that if you have a problem reading a PDF file containing Cyrillic text this may be because you have an old version of Adobe Reader, in which case you should be able to solve the problem by upgrading to a newer version.