Monday, September 26, 2005

(General) Accent marks



How can I get accent marks into my posts? I have tried changing to the French or Spanish keyboard installed with Windows, and I have tried to use the method of holding down the ALT button and keying in the numerical code. It shows up just fine on either the Edit Html view, or on the Compose view but when I post I get odd things. For example, this should be e with an accent slanting to the left: è .

Well, I'll be darned; that worked! How come it doesn't work on my blogger blog? I get a Z with a funny mark on top.

You can go to my blog and note the sidebar link to Blog Appétit to see what I mean.

Has anyone had this problem?


This post was written by Alyce from Mantia's Musings




12 comments:

Amy Sherman said...

Special characters need special code. Here is a great cheat sheet:

http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/reference/special_characters/

Alanna Kellogg said...

Glad you asked this!

Anonymous said...

In particular, you need to use special HTML entity references (things like é for é) because different computers use different default encodings. Up to a certain point, the numerical code for characters is all the same. 65 is A pretty much everywhere. Or maybe it's a. Whatever. Above that certain point, each system started assigning special characters to numerical values willy-nilly. So when you type é on your computer, and use the numerical code for it (either deliberately or behind the scenes), to my computer it will probably look different. This is why people who copy and paste from Word have blog posts that are unreadable to Mac users. It's usually the smart quotes that do people in.

This is largely because the U.S. dominated in computers for so long, so why would you need to bother to assign a known value to ü, for instance? We're not known for thinking of the complexities of other languages.

When you use an HTML entity reference, you're basically telling the brower, "I don't care what you need to do, but put an è on this page."

Anonymous said...

When you hold the ALT key down and put in the numerical code are you using the number pad on the keyboard left? It doesn't work if you use the numbers on top of the keyboard.

Alyce said...

Amy, do I hold the ALT key down to do these? 'Cause when I do, I get Greek alphabet figures, not the specified item.

Derrick, how do I find these HTML references?

And Barbara, I was using the keypad, not the numbers on top. I've tried this in my own blog and how come it worked in the post above and not in mine?

It's frustrating...

Anonymous said...

Alyce,

The link Amy provides gives you a good reference (you can also look in the HTML spec).

So if you wanted to reference a village in Germany, within the post you'd write Ürzig (see section 7 in the URL Amy links to). That would give you Ürzig. Sorry if I wasn't clear

Anonymous said...

Rats. Blogger re-translated for me.

That should read: "Within the post you'd write Ürzig...to get Ürzig in the browser"

Estelle Tracy said...

Here's a website that I really like: http://www.typeit.org/

Enjoy!!

cucina testa rossa said...

i use this web site when i post to Bay Area Bites since blogger.com doesn't support foreign characters. luck for me typepad does or i'd be here all day.

http://www.ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm

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I also meet such problems when i use the compute.
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