on 5/19/2000 11:14 AM, Magda Danish (Unicode) <v-magdad@microsoft.com>
wrote:
> I am setting up a personal web site, and I would like to be able for it to
> contain English, Spanish, Hebrew, and Japanese, without having to resort to
> graphics file being referenced for every letter of a non-roman alphabet.
>
> What should I do for the META tags? How do I reference each character? And,
> is
> there an application that will allow me to write directly in the Unicode
> standard regardless of language (I am using a Macintosh computer)?
There are applications that let you edit in Unicode on Mac OS 9.0 or later,
but none that are publicly available yet. These can be used to edit a plain
Unicode text file, which you would then need to convert to UTF-8. This can
be done via the publicly available utility Cyclone:
http://www.ire.pw.edu.pl/~tkukiel/cyclone.html
Cyclone can also convert between any Mac OS encoding and Unicode, but only
one Mac OS encoding. English and Spanish use MacRoman, Hebrew uses
MacHebrew, and Japanese uses MacJapanese. There isn't one Mac encoding that
can handle all of them.
Microsoft Word 98 also can save documents as plain Unicode (UTF-16) text
files, which can then be converted to UTF-8 using Cyclone. It looks like the
HTML support can also directly save a web page in UTF-8, but I wasn't able
to figure out how to get this to work. Still, if you have Word, this is
probably the best bet: you can edit a document with English, Spanish, and
Japanese, and save it as a web page in UTF-8 directly (if you spend more
time finding out how to do it than I did). The only downside is that Word
does not support Hebrew.
In fact, the only Mac web browser I am aware of that supports *display* of
Hebrew is iCab; neither Communicator nor Internet Explorer will do this. So
you might have other problems with Hebrew. Mozilla for Mac will probably
support Hebrew as well.
As for META tags, use "UTF-8" as the character set if you save it in UTF-8.
You can look at other resources to find out the form of a META tag. If you
use Word, it might set the META tag for you directly in the HTML it
generates.
I hope this helps...
Deborah Goldsmith
Manager, International Toolbox Group
Apple Computer, Inc.
goldsmith@apple.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:02 EDT