American Software (IE) and foreign fonts

Ever since Ñañi showed up on the boards, I’ve been wondering how well American browsers deal with the “special” characters. I know that at least one person had trouble with them because he jumped all over Ñañi for “having a stupid name with boxes in it.”
Is there any one out there with the MS Internet Explorer who can answer this question for me? I’m directing this specifically at the the IE users because I’m pretty sure that Mozilla (and Netscape 6 and 7 because of their Mozilla base) and Opera (being a Norwegen product) can deal with this pretty well.
As a test, the following is a list of letters and their couterparts with umlaut (the double dots above the letter:)
A Ä
a ä
O Ö
o ö
U Ü
u Ü

Just for fun, here is the “micro” symbol: µ

All of these show up just fine on my English Mozilla on German Windows 98. How do they work for you?

most of the characters you cite will be in the ASCII range 224 - 254 The answer the user will see will depend on what language set s/he has installed, what operating system, and many other variables.

Well, the “Ñ” (tilde N) is code 165. “Ü” (umlaut U) is code 154. I had to dig out an ancient ASCII table to get the right numbers. Looking them up in the Windows symbol table got me some interesting stuff, but not what I needed.

I do see the umlauts. But if rampisad is right, it doesn’t mean much.

I aimed the question specifically at American users of IE on American versions of Windows - although perhaps not clearly enough. I would expect an internationalized version to deal with the special characters properly. I’m just wondering how well the US software handles it.
Mozilla (on Win98 german and Linux,) IE (Win98 german,) Opera (Win98 german,) Konqueror (Linux,) Nestcape 4.75 (Linux, Win98 german) all deal just fine with such things.

I have explained this several times in past threads.
Control panel, keyboard , properties,: US_INTERNATIONAL

now ~ + n = ñ
~ + N = Ñ
" + a =ä
’ + a = á
"+ e = ë
" + space = "
ctrl alt ? = ¿

ctrl alt ! = ¡

and so on and so forth

I think the main issue here is the configuration of Windows rather than the browser. Windows can support a huge range of localised input and display parameters, but by default most of them aren’t installed.

It sounds like the person who has a problem reading Ñañi’s name has some kind of problem with the international parts of windows and likely would not be able to see the name rendered corerctly in Mozilla, Opera or any other product.

It’s possible that they have a preconfigured machine direct from the manufacturer and something was left off.

For the record IE displays Ñañi’s name correctly on all of my boxes, from my internationalisation PC to my basic one with just UK and US English installed.

Assuming you’re talking about fairly recent versions of Windows (98 or later, for the sake of argument) there’s no real substantial difference between most of the international distributions. It’s just a case of installed fonts, keyboard types and translations for the text.

Thanks Sailor. Right answer to the wrong question. I don’t have trouble typing the stuff (except for the tilde) because they are on my german keyboard which I am using with a german language version of Windows 98 in my office at work here in Wiesbaden, Germany (alternatively, my german keyboard on my multilingual Linux box at home.)
I’m simply wondering how well Windows and IE deal with displaying the stuff that I type.
BTW:
That was not sarcasm when I said thanks for the answer on how to type the characters in question on an american keyboard. I’ve never had occasion to have to do it, but it is good to know that it can be done without much difficulty.

Does everyone see this € symbol?

It’s the Euro symbol BTW

Which is sort of the point. What is the default setup for an american system?

>> Thanks Sailor. Right answer to the wrong question.

Oh. You mean I’m supposed to actually read the OP? :slight_smile:

Actually I have to plead guilty to doing what I have accused others of doing.

Yes, Wester versions of IE should display all those symbols without problem as they are part of the iso-8859-1 character set which IE supports. OTOH, if you want to display other character sets like Arabic, Chinese or Thai, then you need to go to MS Windows update and download the support for that set.

Also note, the newer version of IE will notice if an actual font is used for another language and prompt you to download and install it. Since I work a lot with asia, my english version of IE can display Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese.

I’m a typical American using Windows XP and IE6, I see the characters fine (even the Euro symbol). No boxes.

Thanks guys. Curiosity got the better of me and I had to find out. I didn’t think to try it when I was in the US about a year ago. I was busy visiting with family, not twiddling with computers.

Not really. The header of the page specifies the character set. If the header does not specify then you can run into symbols displayed wrong. If the header is wrong then you can get error messages. For instance, go to this page and you may get an error message. The page is in English but the header says it is in Chinese (big5) and you may get a prompt to install the Chinese support if you have not installed it yet. Look at the source code and you will see “charset=big5”. Some Chinese coder forgot to switch gears.

I do not believe this is correct. You can download IE support for various character sets at the Windows update site but that is only for IE to display HTML pages. If you want to install support for a foreign keyboard then you have to go to control panel, keyboard and iinstall it there but that only supports the keyboard. If you want to have Chinese characters in WORD then you have to install those fonts separately. I do not think Windows as such has any universal switch where you say “now speak Chinese”. At any rate, what the browser displays is to do with the browser and not with Windows.

Here is page I put up on my website as a reference for myself that has all the ASNI characters written out in VBScript (using the function chr(#)). 0-31 are non-printable btw.

There is no charset in the header of the page, just a loop through all the numbers 0-255.

Anyway, you can look at it in different browsers and see how it looks. Just a reference for y’all.

I didn’t go right into the details before since they’re quite complex.

IE and Windows use the same language settings. If Windows does not have support for Chinese installed then IE cannot display Chinese characters. When IE installs a language pack it’s actually installing a Windows language pack. You can verify this by looking in the Regional Options in the control panel.

As a test, try the following:
Look in Regional Options in the control panel and verify that Traditional Chinese is not ticked in the list of system languages. Then visit this page that contains some Traditional Chinese text in Internet Explorer. IE should prompt to download a language pack at this point (if not select View/Encoding from the IE menus and select Chinese Traditional (BIG5)). Let the language pack install and you’ll then be able to see that the Chinese box is now ticked in the control panel applet. All applications can now access the data contained in the Chinese language pack.

Included in the language packs are things like rules for formatting dates and currencies, fonts for displaying the written characters, input locales and keyboard definitions etc. If you need to use a foreign keyboard you can install only the keyboard definition from a language pack, but you may find extra characters do not render correctly on the screen without the rest of the it.

You’re correct to say that there is no big “Be Chinese” button in Windows, but you can set Chinese to be the default system locale. The effects of this are not immediately obvious, but any application that uses the Windows API to format its date/time or currency output will begin using Chinese formats and characters. To be really Chinese you’ll need a localised version of Windows. This means, basically, that Chinese is the default selection for the system locale and all of the Windows text, helpfiles, dialog titles etc will have been translated. This page lists all available localised versions of MS Operating Systems (By way of translation 1033 is the LCID for US English).

Most applications, browsers included, depend on the Windows language packs for displaying non-standard characters. In the end only a very rare few have their own system of fonts or make minimum use of the Windows GUI API. This behavior is usually restricted to things like CAD packages that may need to enter text as simple vectors for output on devices like plotters. As far as I know all of the major browsers use Windows fonts, input locales, codepage mapping and other services to render pages. If Windows ain’t got it, they can’t do it.

In my original answer I was trying to point out that there’s really no hard and fast default for US Windows. A fresh-from-Microsoft copy of English Windows will select US English as its default, but will also offer the option to change it on install. OEM provided versions of Windows may change this. Pre-installed copies of Windows may be different again. I realise that this probably wasn’t the answer you were looking for, but I figured since it was in GQ I’d try to give a broader background to it.

The same thing with a little formatting: http://sailor.teemingmillions.com/code.htm

I can generate the € symbol by hitting the right ALT + 5 on my keyboard and it is displayed correctly in IE, MS-WORD, Wordpad and WIN98 (like in a filename) but Notepad will not display it correctly.

The € symbol does not appear on the character set table I posted.
The html code for the Euro symbol is €. Supported by Netscape and Internet Explorer versions 4 and up