[Home]ToothyWikiInternals/NonEnglishLanguages

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Due to numerous /ErrorReports, the ToothyWiki server always tells the browser that the pages served are in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This is broken, but has been broken for such a long time that most browsers provide a workaround as standard.

There is, in principle, nothing to stop you typing in page text in a non-English language. Page titles are probably best limited to Latin characters, though, since more than one encoding will break RecentChanges.

I am hereby declaring the Windows set of encodings as standard for ToothyWiki. This means that if you regularly use MSIE to view pages in your non-English-language of choice, ToothyWiki is likely to just work without you having to do anything special. My logs reveal that the great majority of visitors use MSIE5/6, so this seems like the best solution.




Workaround



If text other people have typed does not display correctly, and/or other people cannot read text you type, you need to force your browser to use the encoding that everyone else is. Unless stated elsewhere on the page, this will be the Windows standard for the language. In MSIE, click on "View".."Encoding", and then select from the list. The procedure is similar in Netscape, but I don't have a copy to hand here so can't tell you what the menu titles are.

If you're the first person to write non-English text on a page, you have the option of choosing the encoding. KOI8 is to cp1251 roughly what *nix is to Windows, so some people prefer that; I imagine it's similar for other languages. If you're going to do that, it's probably kind to say so somewhere, unless you are writing an elitist page you don't want anyone else to be able to read.

It's not a very good idea to mix several non-English languages on the same page, since browsers will have problems displaying more than one at once.




I have no current plans to support Unicode. If anyone has any ideas other than that, feel free to jot them down ^^;
PunyCode should work without any intervention on your behalf.  I don't know if anyone actually wants to use it, but it's there.  --Vitenka
Isn't that just for domain names? Besides, it doesn't work in MSIE - or Lynx, for that matter. - MoonShadow
It's commonly only used for domain names - but it's just normal printable characters.  So there's nothing stopping someone using them in a page and asking the reader to copy-paste them into a translator.  There's no automatic plugin for most browsers, true...  --Vitenka  (If you were feeling really bored you could add one next to the ROT13 box)

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Last edited August 9, 2005 2:24 pm (viewing revision 4, which is the newest) (diff)
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