How to display national characters within your web browser.
Introduction
A web page with national characters?

There are two ways to put non-ASCII characters in a Web page:

  • using local character set; or
  • using unicode character set.

There are many local character sets provided (for example Central European, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, etc.). For displaying these pages you will need support for the particular character set.

Unicode, on the other hand is a new standard for multi character sets text. Unicode includes sets mentioned above (and many others). For unicode you will need a browser which understands unicode...

How does my browser get informed about web page character set?

The web server may be configured in a way to inform the browser about character set before downloading the page. This would be nice.

However, very often character set name is available from inside of a document only, using so called META tag. In such a case your browser may, or may not understand this. Sometimes you must reload the page, or set the charset information manually (usually via the View menu), to display the page properly.

So what should I do with my browser?
Netscape (Unix, Windows, Mac, ...)

Just download fonts, install in your system, then in Netscape preferences enable them.

In unix-like system to enable unicode, install all national fonts you need, Netscape will map the characters properly.

For other systems you will need unicode font, see: Netscape font resources. I am using Cyberbit.ZIP font.

If you need more information, consult Netscape Web pages, look for international support.

MS Internet Explorer

Contact Microsoft Web pages, select Support, then select Updates or something. Install ``XXX Text Display Support'' where XXX stays for the language you desire.

Tested environments

We have tested successfully following environments:

  • Netscape Navigator 4.*
  • MS Internet Explorer 5.0, NT4.0+SP4
  • MS Internet Explorer 5.0, Windows 98

You should not expect successes with:

  • MS Internet Explorer 3.0

May, or may not work:

  • MS Internet Explorer 5.0, Windows 95
Links

To check, whether your browser understands unicode and other foreign characters, please visit this page.

You will find much more information here.

Please note, that some of the links may not work - Internet changes every second...

robmar   i moja praca