--- Forwarded Message from [log in to unmask] (Robert Smitheram) ---

>From: [log in to unmask] (Robert Smitheram)
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 11:16:05 -0500
>Subject: Re: #4802.1 Using Non-Western Fonts in WYSIWYGs (!)
>References: <[log in to unmask]>
>Organization: Center for Educational Technology

Jorg Waltje <[log in to unmask] writes:
>I have to point out that the problems we are experiencing seem to be
>generated by our Macintosh computers.  Using a font like Bukarist 1251 in
>Netscape composer on a PC worked just fine.  However, we are trying to be
>completely dual platform, since the Ohio5 is a collaborative project
>involving both PC and Mac campuses.  With Macs, already the text entry
>(for example copying cyrillic text which was generated with a font like
>Bukarist 1251) from Simple Text into PageMill screws everything up, but
>PageMill does not allow to choose a font and then type the text directly
>into the editor.

The problem here is that almost all WYSIWYG web editors try to compensate for accented characters being encoded differently on the Mac as opposed to Windows by means of an exchange code using ampersands. The problems you are experiencing with Cyrillic can
also occur to web content developers who work in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc., almost any language other than most Wester European, alphabetic or otherwise, that use high-ascii for coding purposes. The codes must be absolute, but as I mentioned above,
most web editing software will relativize the coding for high ascii so that the codes can be switched when it arrives at the client browser side; thus content developed on a Mac will not appear correctly on a Windows machine and vice-versa.

The only real suggestion I can offer, other than using <!--noedit--> tags for certain software, is to use Netscape Composer and set the encoding for the entire page. This is done through the <META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=???>
tag which belongs in the header of the page. Netscape Composer will do this for you when you select the encoding for the page from the view/character set menu. In your case you will want Windows 1251 codepage encoding; i.e.:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1251">

And providing you have set up the appropriate fonts/encoding preferences; you should be able to edit and view you pages without any problems.

Good luck,

Robert H. Smitheram

-- 
Center for Educational Technology
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