This applet (which works on a Java-enabled EE Browser) simulates the behaviour of a more powerful earlier version, which read Russian and English character data from external files using layered input streams. In this earlier version, InputStreamReader( ) is incorporated within layers to achieve the transposition between Windows Cyrillic character encoding and the Unicode character encoding employed by Java.
The applet worked in this form using the local Sun "appletviewer" browser, which can access and read local English and Cyrillic text files. However, this earlier applet would not work on Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator in this form because these browsers are set up - very sensibly - so as not to accept external text files from any source.
The simplified version of the applet shown - extended to include German text - receives the equivalent text as String parameters passed directly to the applet.
The earlier version of this applet was also converted to Java Swing to improve "look and feel". Although this could be set up for the MS and Netscape browsers by Java Plug-in software, which would be practicable in an intranet environment, it cannot be used on the Internet, without necessitating users to download the necessary Java plug-in software. For this reason, a non-Swing version has been implemented on this web site.

This applet works under Internet Explorer 5.0, using Windows Cyrillic "Cp1251" character encoding; Netscape Communicator 4.73 does not accept this encoding. German text incorporating characters from the Latin_1_Supplement character set uses "8859_1" encoding. The characteristics of 3 browsers are tabulated below.

Russian Test Configurations