In a big quandry at the moment.
We're doing database driven web project for a russian company and they've supplied us with a lot of txt files (to use for Oracle DB queries and plain text for display) only we can't seem to get russian characters to display on our machines and have no way of knowing if it's going to work for our client.
The database queries and sample text looks like this when viewed in notepad:
sorry, must add, i'm using windows 2000.
You could ask them which font they're using to view the txt files. It may be a special hack-encoded font to get around some limitation in the DB. Can't think of another reason why this would be broken in this day and age.
This is just a single-byte text in WS Windows 1251 Cyrillic codepage. First two words "
Thanks for the responses.
Wonderful news Johnych, we were afraid we'd lost the data. I do have one question though -- how did you get that to display on the screen in cyrillic?
When we view the files in notepad etc. all we see is the messed up code above, and when we pull it out of the database and display it on a web page, all we see is upside down question marks.
Any ideas (you would be lifesaving!!)
Thanks,
Jordan
Hmm...
To read the text I had to transfer it from MacOS X to MacOS 9. 
Shortly, you just need a font supporting Cyrillic to read the text in Notepad.
Choose e.g. Times New Roman in Format/Font in Notepad. There is the Script combo box in the Font dialog. Choose Cyirillic. If there is no Cyrillic for Times New Roman then try other fonts or ask your client to send you a font.
Perhaps you will need to switch on Cyrillic support in Control Panels, I don't know. Cannot add anything more since I use Win XP which is more language-friendly than 2k.
By the way, all that Cyrillic text above is readable in IE under XP with proper language settings except letter "ü" in 1 -
Captured from web.archive.org on 21 Oct 2013. view this capture