diacritic html

[sigrid]

I am building a webpage where many names have diacritic marks. When I enter
the names, such as René, it looks fine in my Word document but when it is
published to the site, it comes up as Ren�. I have tried manually entering
the codes, using insert symbol, using the language toolbar, etc., but it
always comes back the same. Even writing out the full html code doesn't
work. Could the ISP or the administrator have chosen something that blocks
these? It also happens if I use a double space, quotation marks, an em dash,
etc.

Thanks

 

[Jezebel]

Getting the diacritics to appear relies on a) specifiying a character set
encoding, and b) the reader having a font that includes the non-standard
characters. To deal with a) ---

Have a look at your HTML - there should be a line near the top that looks
like

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Then read http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset.en.php



But creating web pages with Word is pretty much a disaster whatever you do.

 

[sigrid]

Thanks. My line says: <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html;
charset=windows-1252">

If I am understanding this correctly, I should be repace 'windows-1252' with
'utf-8'. However, when I did that in a test file, the text disappeared. Is
the utf-8 adjustment something that the web server administrator should do?

You say that using WORD for web pages is often a disaster. What would you
recommend? I have possible access to Dreamweaver and to Front Page. Would I
have to redo the whole page if I switched to one of those? Obviously, I am
not an HTML expert so I need something that works pretty intuitively.

Thanks again. Sigrid

 

[Jezebel]

Web server administrators don't come into it. utf-8 should work fine (works
for me, anyway); but so should windows-1252. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252

Browse to a web page that displays the characters you want, View > Source,
and see what they've used.

Almost anything is better than Word for creating web pages: have a look at
how much rubbish is in the HTML. FrontPage is good. Never used DreamWeaver.
You can open the Word-created HTML in either of those and go from there.

 

[sigrid]

Windows-1252 was what I had in the first place and it does not work. Utf-8
killed the display altogether and I just tried iso-8859-1 that is used by a
lot of foreign sites. It does the same thing as the original windows-1252.
Thanks anyway. At least this has gotten me on the right track for finding
out what to do. BTW, ALL HTML looks like rubbish to me! I appreciate your
input.

 

[sigrid]

Jezabel!

Thank you, thank you.

I found out that the code has to match the one chosen by my server, which
was utf-8. Since Word didn't let me change it, I went to Netscape Composer
which I have on my computer, changed the code name, and re-entered my text.
Voila. So it WAS Word that was the screw up agent. You got me going down
the right path. Thanks.

Sigrid

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hi Sigrid,

You can fix this, though it still won't make Word a good webpage creator.

In Tools | Options | General, click Web Options, go to Encoding, you should
be able to tell it to use UTF-8.

The location may have changed in various versions--if that doesn't work, see
the help topic:
Set the language encoding for a Web page

 

[sigrid]

Daiya:

Thank you very much! Now I can change the code on all of my old pages on
the site without having to reconfigure each manually because there is also a
button to click to make that change. Thanks! You and Jezebel have rescued me
from more long hours talking to IT guys, WORD 'Support', computer guru
brothers, etc.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

You're welcome, glad to help.