[thelist] Netscape 7 font/special character bug?

Emma Jane Hogbin emmajane at xtrinsic.com
Tue Mar 4 12:07:01 CST 2003


On Tue, Mar 04, 2003 at 05:37:36AM -0800, Mark wrote:
> However, while the HTML (& XHTML) generated by any version of MS Word
> (Word98 Mac, Word 2K WinME, or WordX OSX, and for that matter, the
> HTML created by Adobe products such as Indesign or Dreamweaver MX),
> the representation of these Greek characters work fine with prior
> versions of Netscape (4 and 3), and they work with all old and new
> version of MS Explorer.

I thought that you were getting a couple of different kinds of output, but
you only pasted one sample of HTML at the bottom. The rest of the email is
mostly useless if you're always getting the same output from the different
kinds of HTML editors you're using.

You've gotten some other good suggestions. Here are a few more:
	- what DTD are you using? If you're using XHTML 1.0 Strict you
	  won't be able to use <font> tags.

	- what character encoding are you using?
	How to check:
	if you're using XHTML you may have something at the very very top
	that looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="xxxxxx" ?>

	otherwise you ought to have something like this:
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
	charset=xxxxxxxxxxxx">

	- what actually makes a symbol when you look at the HTML? Is it:
		- the actual symbols
		- &entities;
		- \escapedNumbers

> BUT - It breaks (showing just the default English font) with Netscape
> 7 (and Mozilla and Safari), no matter what platform (I've tested it
> with Mac OS 9.2.2, Mac OSX, Win ME, and Win MX.  (While working fine
> on Explorer in all of these platforms.)

Sounds like you *might* be using the windows encoding for the characters.

> be fixed in the future will solve my problems.  If it is, however,
> the typical monopolistic game playing by Microsoft  in their
> insipidly evil attempts to control the Wide Webbed World by co-opting
> standards

Heh. Windows has (in my opinion) actually done some good work in making
their platform available to non-English languages. Not necessarily great
work mind you, but they're definitely willing to consider there's more
than just the ASCII character set. I wouldn't trust anyone's save-as-html
functions regardless of whether they're Microsoft or superman's.

> ps: An example of the failed HTML is:
> <span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:Symbol'>s</span><i><sub><span
> style="font-size:6.5pt">t</span></sub></i><span
> style="font-size:11.0pt">???????????????????? The letter displayed
> should NOT appear as an 's', but should be the greek character
> 'SIGMA', which looks like a b fallen forward. </span></p></div></body>

Try seeing if you can get the HTML output using encoded characters instead
of just styled letters. There might be an option somewhere...As others
have recommend UTF-8 is probably the best alternative. I believe the
latest version of Office on XP saves everything in Unicode, but I haven't
played with it at all (I've only had to deal with people copying and
pasting their unicode into iso-8859-1 documents and then wondering why it's
breaking).

emma

--
Emma Jane Hogbin
[[ 416 417 2868 ][ www.xtrinsic.com ]]



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