On a website I use the futura font. I use some french language text, so I need the "à" character, amongst others. I use UTF-8 charset.
Weirdly, the "à" shows up as an r with an accent on top (see the pic)
i tried HTML encoding
à
But the result is the same. Is there something I can do about it?
There is rather insufficient information in the question, but the probable explanation is that the HTML document is not in the UTF-8 encoding but in the ISO-8859-1 and the browser is interpreting it as ISO-8859-2 encoded. The letter “à” has the code E0 (hexadecimal) in ISO-8859-1; in ISO-8859-2, this code denotes the letter “ŕ”.
How to fix this? It depends on how the problem was created, especially how the character encoding is declared (or guessed by browsers). See
https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-encoding-declarations .
Related
I am wondering, if I can use html-entities like
<h5><em>⇆</em> Headline</h5>
without any fallback if I use utf-8? (because on my systems this works totally fine). Are all these chars from http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref really all embedded into the utf-8-charset by default?
And how would I use it correctly, like this:
<h5><em>⇆</em> Headline</h5>
that
<h5><em>⇆ </em> Headline</h5>
or
<h5><em>⇆</em> Headline</h5>
There are two separate issues here:
get the browser to understand which character you want
render that character visually
For the first point, there are two options:
Embed the character directly as is, for which you will need to serve the HTML in an encoding that can encode that character. Yes, "⇆" is a Unicode character and can be encoded by any Unicode encoding. UTF-8 is the best choice here. The browser then simply needs to understand that the document is encoded in UTF-8 and it will be able to read and understand the character correctly. Set the appropriate HTTP header to denote the encoding.
Embed the character as an HTML entity. HTML entities is a way to embed any arbitrary character using only ASCII characters, e.g. ⇆. To encode this, your encoding of choice only needs to be able to encode &, l, r, a and ;, which are very standard characters in any encoding. This special sequence of characters is understood by the browser to mean the character "⇆". By embedding characters as HTML entities you can largely ignore the intricacies of managing encodings correctly, but it makes your source code rather unreadable. You should not do this in this day and age.
Whether you use named entities (⇆) or refer to the character by its Unicode code (⇆) doesn't really matter, they both result in the same thing.
Having handled this, the character needs to be actually rendered as a glyph on screen. For this, an appropriate font is necessary. You'll have to test whether most of your target audience uses a system which has a font installed by default which contains this character. You can also provide your own font to the browser which contains this character as a web font.
How does meta charset work? Please correct my understanding if I am wrong. As I understand it, the charset is used as to indicate what encoding the page is to be shown? If I put a very specific encoding, others might not be able to see it displayed correctly. But why? Isn't the encoding set on the meta tage and the browser renders characters based on the charset? Or do I have the wrong idea (probably)?
Letters, numbers and other characters have to represented in computers as bytes.
There are different ways (character encodings) that can be used to represent the same characters. Usually you'll want to use UTF-8 these days.
Meta charset tells the browser which one you have used so it knows how to decode the bytes into characters correctly.
If you tell the browser you are using UTF-8 when you are actually using ISO-8859-1, then you'll get errors (the wrong characters) showing up in places where the encodings do not overlap.
character_set Specifies the character encoding for the HTML document.
In theory, any character encoding can be used, but no browser understands all of them. The more widely a character encoding is used, the better the chance that a browser will understand it.
Is there any way to type this word "हिन्दी中文(简体)" in html?
I see that there's codes for special characters in html for example for "العربية" العبية
But I can't find these codes for this "हिन्दी中文(简体)"
There are tools out there that can do this conversion from raw Unicode symbols to encoded HTML entities.
हिन्दी中文(简体)
Yes, you can write “हिन्दी中文(简体)” as “हिन्दी中文(简体)” in HTML. Naturally, you need a character encoding that lets you do that, primarily UTF-8, but that’s a good idea anyway.
You can write any character using a character reference like ह (for U+0939 DEVANAGARI LETTER HA, “ह”), but this increases the data size and makes the HTML code look very obscure.
Although I included the ISO-8859-1 content-type META, my website isn't displaying special characters, such as ã and ê. If I 'echo' a string from a MYSQL query, the special character is displaying properly. If I write the SAME character in plain HTML, it won't display in the same website.
Thanks in advance.
http://popguest.com.br/event/index3.php?c=48&p=3
Maybe you could use a simple routine to encode all special characters to entities (&#x----; with correct hexadecimal unicode number after x)
(and switching to UTF-8 is not a bad idea)
Currently, I have my webpage set to Unicode/UTF-8. When trying to display a special character (for example, em dash, double arrow, etc), it shows up as a question mark symbol. I cannot change these characters to the HTML entity equivalent. How can I circumvent this issue?
A question mark in a lozenge, �, indicates a character-level error: the data contains bytes that do no represent any character, according to the character encoding being applied. This typically happens when the document is declared as UTF-8 encoded but is really in iso-8859-1, windows-1252, or some similar encoding. Windows-1252 is a common default encoding used by various programs on Windows platforms. So you may need to open the file in your authoring program and re-save it as UTF-8 encoded.
If problems remain, please post the URL. Posting the code alone is not sufficient, since the character encoding is primarily specified in HTTP headers.
If you see a question mark in a small box, then it might be a font-level problem (lack of glyph in the fonts being used), but this would be very rare for common characters like the em dash. Different browsers have different ways of indicating character- or font-level problems.
Make sure your document is set to the correct character encoding in the actual code editor, as well as in the doctype. Both are necessary. I spent hours trying to tweak HTML when the only problem was that I needed to set the text setting in Coda.
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
See the following screenshot:
Make sure your characters are actually UTF-8 characters. They will probably look something like this:
® or U+0020
http://www.kinsmancreative.com/transfer/char/index.php is a handy site for finding the decimal values of commonly used UTF-8 special characters if you need a reference.