Read this for an explanation (and history) of the computer encoding systems for English, foreign-language characters, and special symbols.
When you want to use only a few foreign characters (from primarily European languages) or other special symbols in a Web document, the easiest method is to insert the special numeric codes for those characters directly into the HTML. To look up the code for a particular character, go to Special HTML Characters. This table is based on the ISO8859-1 (also known as ISO Latin-1) character table (which includes the standard English characters). Here are two examples:
You wish to show a price in pounds sterling: £5
From the character table the numeric code for the pound symbol is: £
At the place in your HTML coding where you want the price to appear, you would enter:
£5You wish to write correctly the French word: café
The numeric code for the e-acute accent is: é
Your coding entry would be:
café
Note that the numeric code begins with an ampersand (&) and number (#) sign, and ends with a semi-colon (;).
[THE CHARACTER TABLE ALSO GIVES EQUIVALENT DESCRIPTIVE CODES; IS THERE A PREFERENCE FOR NUMERIC OVER DESCRIPTIVE? WHY?]
[THE ABOVE SEEMS NOT TOO TIME CONSUMING FOR A FEW CHARACTERS. WHAT IS THE SOLUTION FOR EXTENSIVE WRITING IN THESE LANGUAGES?]
Language Kits for the Macintosh
If you use a Macintosh and need to write for the Web in a language
that does not use the ISO Latin-1 character set (above), you should
purchase the appropriate Apple
Language Kit. The kits currently available cover: Arabic and
Persian, Chinese, Cyrillic (including Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian,
Belorussian, Macedonian, and Serbian), Hebrew (and Yiddish), Indian
(Hindi, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, and Nepali; using
Devanagari, Gujarati, and Gurmukhi writing systems), Japanese,
Korean. Netscape Communicator comes with a built-in, WYSIWYG editor
which works with a Language Kit's front-end processor.
Other Macintosh Options
Adobe Pagemill is available in a Japanese version, and is easy to
use. Pagemill also comes in separate, localized versions for French
and German (all the menus and help, etc., are displayed in French and
German). Pagemill does not work with the Apple Language Kits.
BBEdit (and the freeware version, BBEdit Lite) are powerful text editors with HTML tags which let you easily insert into a document. BBEdit and BBEdit Lite are not WYSIWYG systems. Neither works well with the Language Kits because they do not allow any control over the font.
PC Windows
Netscape Communicator should work with whatever foreign-language
text-entry solution you regularly use on your PC, just as it does on
the Macintosh with the Language Kits. [This seems rather
wishy-washy!]
English and most European-language HTML documents created with the ISO Latin-1 character set will display without problems in most Web browsers. To read foreign languages not based on ISO Latin-1, the user may need to configure the browser, as well as install special fonts and other software on the computer. If you are creating Web pages that include foreign-language characters, especially non-Latin based, you will need to instruct your readers on how to configure their computer systems appropriately.
Most of the non-Latin language character sets rely on two-bit encoding and software must be installed software that teaches the computer to recognize the two-bit characters. [WHERE DOES ONE GET THIS SOFTWARE? WHAT IS IT CALLED?]
Fonts for a particular language may need to be installed. [WHERE GET THEM?}
When you create a page using a character set other than ISO Latin-1, make sure to include a warning to your readers on the page. Include instructions for choosing a different font encoding in the browser's Preferences.
In Netscape:
The Yamada Language Center at the University of Oregon maintains sites devoted to language-related issues and resources on the Web:
The Yamada Language Center Language Guides
Yamada Language Center Font Archive
The Summer Institute of Linguistics maintains Sources of Language Fonts on the Internet, with fonts for Macintosh, Windows, MS-DOS, and TeX.
The Apple Macintosh Font archive is an FTP site.