All right, so I should be able to figure this out for myself, and I’m not succeeding. So someone come in, call me an idiot, and tell me how to do it.
I’m trying to learn Esperanto. But there are six letters that just come up as little squares on my browser (Explorer, not sure what version but it came with the computer in 1998).
What do I download/ install/ sacrifice to the dark gods of Bill Gates to get my browser to read those letters?
Would anything like this help?
http://home.arcor.de/gmickle/ssig2_en.html
Saluton, FisherQueen!
One of the many Esperanto-speakers on the boards here. Looks like Ice Wolf beat me to the gist of things though.
Most Esperanto web pages these days use the UTF-8 variant of Unicode to specify the accented characters.
There are still older pages around that use the ISO 8859-3 (also known as “South European” or “Latin-3”) character set though. The first 128 characters of the ISO 8859-3 character set are the same as the regular North American character set, and are the same as the ASCII character set. The second 128 characters differ from the North American character set: among other things, six characters have been replaced by the six superscripted characters used in Esperanto.
It sounds like you’re using a 1998-era version of Internet Explorer. That dates from a time when Unicode was just starting to enter browsers, so I’m not sure how well it would handle Unicode.
If you want to look at a page using ISO 8859-3 character set, you will have to install the ISO 8859-3 fonts, and then tell your browser to use them.
On this computer here, I have IE5. To select a character “encoding”, I choose View, Encoding, More, and then choose the encoding from the list. Unfortunately, my version of IE does not have have a selection for the ISO 8859-3 character set; I had to configure the “User Defined” choice to be ISO 8859-3 . If you want to do this, I’ll provide more details.
Often it’s easier to install a newer browser. I highly recommend that you download and install Mozilla. It’s a free (if somewhat large) download; it handles Unicode, ISO 8859-3, and many other character sets very well.
Ĝis!
Or download IE6, if you have an older version. I have IE6, and I can read Sunspace’s… last word just fine, assuming it’s supposed to be a capital G with a ^ over it, followed by a normal ‘is’. It might help to have Auto-Select on, by going to the View menu, Encoding, and checking Auto-Select if it’s not checked already.
Hauky, that’s exactly what the last word (above my .sig) should be. It means ‘bye!’.
Thank you! I downloaded Mozilla, and I can indeed now do all sorts of neat things, including (hooray!) viewing the Esperanto letters. The links should help me work out how to type them, and I’ll be as happy as a clam.
I use the Esperanto characters on my webpage. I have Internet Explorer 6.0 in Win2K, and they show up fine. However, I would like to make them available to viewers who have earlier/different versions of IE. If Sunspace or anyone else has good instructions I can give my visitors for making it work (keeping in mind that I can’t test them myself), that would be much appreciated!
Esperanto.net is a good page for testing whether your browser can display UTF-8 Unicode properly. It contains the names of about two dozen languages in their native characters.
To type using the superscripted characters is a little trickier. In Windows I use a little program called Ek, that substitutes four of the superscripted letters for the four non-Esperanto letters on a regular US-English QWERTY keyboard. Q is replaced by Ĵ, W is replaced by Ŝ, X is replaced by Ĉ, Y is replaced by Ĝ. Ĥ and Ŭ, because they are less common, remain on the H and U keys respectively, and are accessible through key combinations.
Bertilo Wennergren maintains a comprehensive site that deals with Esperanto and Windows, and Esperanto and Unix, among other things.
And there’s the ‘Text tools’ listing from DMOZ as well: http://dmoz.org/World/Esperanto/Komputiloj/Tekstiloj/