Hawaiian fonts getting messed up

Question

Level 1

21 points

Hawaiian fonts getting messed up

I maintain a Wordpress site as a favor to a small Hawaiian non-profit organization whose work I support. I use the Mac font set to generate the two special diacritical marks needed to write Hawaiian words: the ʻokina and the kahakō. Those marks on the site (malamahalawa.org) get utterly messed up every time there is a Wordpress update.

This is a question for the Wordpress support forum, of course, but I have posted it there and so far, there has been no resolution: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wp-update-totally-messed-up-my-site-again/

One response there suggested that the Hawaiian language diacritical marks generated by my OSX system do not conform to UTF-8 standard character codes, and are thus not compatible with Wordpress. This does not sound plausible to me. French, German and Spanish special characters all apparently survive Wordpress updates. What would be different about Hawaiian diacritical marks?

Does anyone here know enough about Mac character sets to help me out? Iʻd like to rule out the character sets as a possible source of the problem. Thanks!

Posted on Dec 25, 2016 2:48 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Oct 7, 2017 11:57 AM in response to Jan Becket

I have the same issue, but no one seems to have a fix.

Reply

Answer 2

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,136 points

Oct 7, 2017 1:07 PM in response to CordellMB

CordellMB wrote:

I have the same issue

You mean you are also trying to type Hawaiian language text into a WordPress site and the special characters don't display properly?

Reply

Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,136 points

Dec 25, 2016 9:06 PM in response to Jan Becket

Looking at the source of

http://malamahalawa.org/

it seems to me that somehow your utf-8 text is being converted to Latin-1 before you put it on the page. For example, ū, which is utf-8 bytes C5 AB, shows up in the text as the two letter Latin-1 equivalent Å« .

How does the text you compose get transferred to the server? The page and the server are both telling browsers to use utf-8, so I think it is somewhere in between that the encoding is changed.

PS Are you using U+02BB for Okina?

Reply

Answer 4

Jan Becket Author

Level 1

21 points

Dec 25, 2016 9:23 PM in response to Tom Gewecke

Hi Tom,

Thanks for the reply. The characters you see on my malamahalawa.org site have been directly typed into the Wordpress page edit window with my Mac, with its foreign language switched from English to Hawaiian. There is no intermediary software, no word processor. I make sure the little Hawaiian flag is visible in the upper right finder screen, and then enter text directly into Wordpress. The altered characters you are seeing on the site are ones that I previously corrected twice, after two previous Wordpress updates.

If you take a look at my post on the Wordpress support forum, you will see that malamahalawa.org is an add-on domain, running under my own main domain, janbecket.net. The Hawaiian diacritical marks there on the top level do not get corrupted with every Wordpress update, although some of those pages have been taken from Libre Office documents. What if this time I process all the corrected pages through Libre Office? Just a thought.

The Hawaiian kahakō is the same as the latin macron. I wonder if there might be a problem with the character set itself.

Reply

Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,136 points

Dec 26, 2016 11:49 AM in response to Jan Becket

Jan Becket wrote:

What if this time I process all the corrected pages through Libre Office? Just a thought.

Certainly worth a try, or with TextEdit, as long as your plain text is save as utf-8.

Unfortunately I don't use Wordpress and have no knowledge of how it works. But there's no way as far as I know that your mac could generate anything other than utf-8 using the Apple Hawaiian keyboard. It seems like the Wordpress page edit window system must somehow be converting that to Latin one.

Reply

Answer 6

Jan Becket Author

Level 1

21 points

Dec 26, 2016 11:51 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanks - this helps confirm that the issue lies over on the Wordpress side. Going back to the WP support forum ...

Reply