09 January 2007

Accented characters: resolution?

Thanks to some friends who have given me feedback in both blog comments and e-mails, I've learned that the one browser that doesn't display the French accented characters in my blog is Safari on the Macintosh.

I can enter the accents as HTML codes in my text, but I'm not inclined to do so. Typing them the way I do is easy and quick. Writing the blog is not a professional enterprise. I'm not selling anything.

I can also quit using the French accented characters. Ha! No way, José.

If you are using the Safari browser on a Mac, here's a work-around (as they say in the software business): use Firefox instead. Firefox is a free download here. Choose the language you want and the operating system you use (Mac, in this case). I've been using Firefox on Windows for a while now, and I like it.

Want to see what the HTML codes for accented characters look like? Here's the code for an e with an accute accent: & # 2 3 3 ; I would have to type that without the spaces between the characters for you to see this character: é. So the word café would look like this in my text, without the spaces between the characters: c a f & # 2 3 3 ;. That would make proofreading impossible.

Maybe there's a side of this I haven't figured out yet. I have to deal with the Blogger editing application too. For now, I'm not going to change anything.

5 comments:

  1. Similar to your situation, I rarely feel like switching back and forth in the Outlook or Word language programs to include les acccents. If there were an easier fix, I'd be there. Many, many thanks for the map. Great fun. --E

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  2. The accented characters seem to be working fine now on Safari and Shiira, but why? Who knows? Who cares...

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  3. Eleanor, you can install the US-International keyboard. It's easy to do. And then to see é, for example, you press the apostrope key and then the e. Works with capital letters too.

    Chris and Peter, I used the HTML codes for accented characters in this posting. But I went back to my regular way in the next post, the one showing café signs. Can you tell the difference?

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  4. The accented characters are displaying fine in Safari on the café signs blog, too.

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  5. Chris and Peter, what you say makes me wonder if a glitch in the Blogger authoring software made the accented characters temporarily weird. Could be, of course.

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