fForeign Characters = Garbled HTML

Question

fForeign Characters = Garbled HTML

My daughter has a MacBook Pro. In the past, she's used her PC to upload HTML pages from MS Word docs for her internet Spanish students. These docs contain accented letters, etc.
Everything works fine from her PC, but the Spanish characters show as boxes or other (wrong) characters when she uploads the HTML file from her Mac. The HTML files generated by Word look fine on her Mac screen, but they get scrambled during the upload. She's using the college's WebCT software to handle uploads.
When she downloads the Mac-generated HTML from WebCT in DOC format and reposts it as HTML from a PC, it works fine.
I know she can save the files as PDFs, but most of her students are stretching their internet abilities just opening web pages; they shouldn't have to resize a PDF that opens in another window. And, yes, she can reboot using Bootcamp and use PC Word, but things are supposed to be easier on the Mac, not harder.
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Andy Tubbesing

macbook pro Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Posted on Oct 2, 2006 6:05 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Oct 2, 2006 6:21 AM in response to Andy Tubbesing

I think it should be possible in the "save as..." dialog, to specify the Windows character set (in "Web options...", tab "coding"). You may want to select "Always use the coding default for files" option there).
BTW: Not sure these are the correct names as I use a French version ("Options Web...", "codage", "Toujours utiliser les pages Web en utilisant le codage par défaut").
The meta tag of the htm file is changed from "charset=macintosh" to "charset=windows-1252"
Hope this helps

Reply

Answer 2

Steve_O

Level 2

420 points

Oct 2, 2006 6:23 AM in response to Andy Tubbesing

Without knowing more, it is difficult to say exactly what the problem is, but it is likely with the character encoding, which is specified in the "head" of the html document, like this

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

My guess is that the encoding that her copy of word is using does not contain these Spanish characters.

You can specify the character encoding. File > Save as Web Page > Web Options, then click the "Encoding" tab and try selecting unicode (UTF-8). This may work better. Unicode contains almost all characters from almost all languages.

Can you post a link to a garbled html page?

dual 867 MDD Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Reply

Answer 3

Steve_O

Level 2

420 points

Oct 2, 2006 6:35 AM in response to eddy kestemont

Hi Eddy, I'm about 99% sure that using the windows character set will fix the problem when viewing on a PC, but there is a chance that it won't work well on other platforms. Not sure about this, though.

In general with international text, it is probably best to use unicode.

Reply