In this post I’d like to provide a short example of how chatbots, in particular Windows Copilot, can help you address issues related to web browsing, programming, reverse engineering, intelligent internet searching (aka semantic searching) etc.

The issue

In this case I wanted to check what sci-fi writer Pavel Amnuel had on his website. Even though that website looks dated and it is, the information it contains is still relevant to this day. There you can find his essays on hard science fiction, a “A Course of Lectures on TRIZ and the Development of Creative Imagination (PTB)” and more.

That course on Development of Creative Imagination consists of thirteen parts, and it turns out that the 11th one has incorrect encoding and looks like this at the time of writing

ÝÒÈ ÔÀÍÒÀÑÒÈ×ÅÑÊÈÅ ÎÒÊÐÛÒÈß

Ìû ãîâîðèëè îá “îòêðûòèÿõ”, êîòîðûå äåëàåò ñàìà ïðèðîäà. Íî è â ÷åëîâå÷åñêîì îáùåñòâå íå îäíè ëèøü ðàáîòíèêè íàóêè ñîâåðøàþò îòêðûòèÿ. Íå íóæíî çàáûâàòü î êîíêóðåíòàõ – ïèñàòåëÿõ-ôàíòàñòàõ. Òîíêîñòÿìè íàó÷íûõ çíàíèé îíè âëàäåþò äàëåêî íå âñåãäà, íî ïðàâèëàìè ôàíòàçèðîâàíèÿ ïîëüçóþòñÿ êóäà ëó÷øå ó÷åíûõ.

How to fix it with GenAI?

So, what I did I’ve posted a part of it in Windows Copilot and asked about the encoding issue. It came up with a correct explanation right away.

prompt: fix encoding of this text …

response:
The text you’ve provided appears to be Cyrillic text misinterpreted as Latin characters due to incorrect character encoding. Most likely, it was originally written in Russian using Windows-1251 encoding, but then read or displayed using Windows-1252 (Latin-1) or UTF-8 without proper conversion.

🔍 Correct Encoding: Windows-1251 (Cyrillic)

When decoded properly, the text reads as:
РТВ — ЭТО ОЧЕНЬ ПРОСТО!
Г. Альтшуллер
Курс лекций по развитию творческого воображения и теории решения изобретательских задач для начинающих.
(Proverb 11)

В тексте есть некоторые задачи по ТРИЗ из РТВ, из книг и статей Г.С. Альтшуллера, Б.Л. Злотина, А.В.В. Асмана и других авторов.

🛠 How to fix encoding issues

If you encounter similar garbled text:

1. Identify the original encoding — in this case, Windows-1251.
2. Use a text editor or converter that allows you to change encoding (e.g., Notepad++, Sublime Text, iconv).
3. Convert from Windows-1251 to UTF-8 to make it readable across modern systems.

Would you like me to help you convert a file or more text like this?

---

I’ve tried a couple of approaches, again, using Copilot’s assistance. In the end what I’ve ended up doing is saving the page as html file and updating the head element with the following meta tag below which provided correct Cyrillic encoding instead of the Latin one.

<meta charset=”windows-1251″>

This is how the properly encoded version looks like

I’ve also notified the author about this issue, and hopefully, by the time you are reading this post it will be fixed already.

Bonus

One more thing, if you’ve noticed the link to Pavel Amnuel’s website opens that page in English. This is no coincidence. The page is originally in Russian, but Copilot helped me to discover that Google Translate allows to translate a web page into a specific language and get a link to that translated page. How neat is that?

prompt: I mean I need a link that I can share after it was translated
response:
Ah, got it! You want a sharable link to the translated version of the page. Here’s how to do that using Google Translate:

✅ Create a sharable translated link

Use this format:
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=https://milkyway2.com/amnuel/Rtv.htm
This link:

By the way, while on that website you can right click on the mouse button and translate any of the articles into English. Nowadays, translations are of a very high quality.
Also, I saw that when you navigate to a translated page link, other linked pages are translated automatically!