Hello, recode seems to be what I need. Wish list: recode has no GUI :-( I received a cyrillic text which I can't figure out the character set. It's not KOI8 or CP1251. And recode does not guess. -k does not seem to apply to me. The documentation is intense, and after skimming through it, I'm still not sure how the command lines work. I just want to convert from one character set to another. Say from ISO-8859-5 to KOI-8 . I think recode cyrillic..GOST_19768-74 old.rtf is correct. recode doesn't seem to create a new file, for instance recode cyrillic..GOST_19768-74 old.rtf new.rtf is what I would like, so as not to overwrite the file. But this did not work. The list of character sets and their aliasis makes for tough reading. For cyrillic for instance, I found this in the recode doc: "The following Cyrillic charsets are already available in `recode' through RFC 1345 tables: `CP1251' with aliases `1251', ` ms-cyrl' and `windows-1251'; `CSN_369103' with aliases `ISO-IR-139' and `KOI8_L2'; `ECMA-cyrillic' with aliases `ECMA-113', `ECMA-113:1986' and `iso-ir-111', `IBM880' with aliases `880', `CP880' and `EBCDIC-Cyrillic'; `INIS-cyrillic' with alias `iso-ir-51'; `ISO-8859-5' with aliases `cyrillic', ` ISO-8859-5:1988' and `iso-ir-144'; `KOI-7'; `KOI-8' with alias `GOST_19768-74'; `KOI8-R'; `KOI8-RU' and finally `KOI8-U'." What a mess. Table format with a list of the character sets with alias in a columns next to them would make for easier reading. Thanks George -- My personal website http://www.firstnethou.com/gz/welcome.ht -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/