Technical advice

        Some technical advice before you go further: FONTS! This page and help notes are available both in English and Russian, but for some of the databases you will need cyrillic fonts. Also, most of the data require a specific font containing special letters and diacritics. The font for Windows is available HERE. To install it, download the file TIMESTR.ZIP, unzip it and install the font named Times NewR Star (file name: TIMESTR.TTF). If you use Netscape, the font can be installed by choosing Options: General preferences: Fonts; otherwise it should be installed as the default font. The font contains all standard Roman characters, Cyrillic characters and special phonetic characters. The fonts for Macintosh (coding table: Western MacRoman) can be downloaded HERE.

       Fonts for Unix X-Windows are being developed. Until they are available you can view the files without special fonts: for that purpose a method of viewing special letters (but not Cyrillic!) as combinations of some standard codes (ASCII below 127) is provided.

       Chinese characters can either be viewed as pictures in the GIF format or directly, if your system supports Chinese fonts in the BIG5 encoding system. Chinese fonts make the connection much faster, but note that in that case you shall not be able to use Cyrillic letters and special phonetic symbols.