RE: Web Form: General question

From: Addison Phillips [wM] (aphillips@webmethods.com)
Date: Wed May 29 2002 - 17:22:51 EDT


I believe this is covered by the FAQ located at
http://www.unicode.org/help/display_problems.html

The main issue, not to reiterate too much, is one of available fonts.
Basically there are four things that can happen when viewing Unicode text:

1. You see the character you expect to see.
2. You see multibyte trash (sometimes called "mojibake"), which is the
result of a program that is not aware of your current Unicode encoding
displaying the characters as if they were is some other encoding.
3. You see a question mark where you expect to see your character. This is
the result of a bad character encoding conversion (or more properly, the
encoding your text was converted to didn't contain the character you are
viewing).
4. You see a hollow box or black square. In this case, your software "knows"
what the character is, but "doesn't have a picture of it" to show you (that
is, your current font doesn't have this character).

On Windows there are some fonts (notably Arial Unicode MS) that can be
installed to show you nearly any Unicode character. On UNIX you are usually
tied to whatever is installed in your system. You may need to mix-and-match
fonts to see all of your characters (this is what Java tries to do and what
IE and Netscape do).

Hope that helps.

Thanks,

Addison

Addison P. Phillips
Globalization Architect
webMethods, Inc.
432 Lakeside Drive
Sunnyvale, California, USA
+1 408.962.5487 (phone)
+1 408.210.3569 (mobile)
-------------------------------------------------
Internationalization is an architecture.
It is not a feature.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On
> Behalf Of Magda Danish (Unicode)
> Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2002 11:58 AM
> To: unicode
> Subject: FW: Web Form: General question
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Date/Time: Mon May 27 20:58:22 EDT 2002
>
> Contact: wzheng@uark.edu
>
> Report Type: General question
>
> Text of the report is appended below:
>
> -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
>
> When I use an editor(written by Python language) in Pc(Windows 2000),
> some Unicode can be shown correctly, such as square root symbol(u221A)
> and integration symbol(u222B), but they cannot be shown on Unix(be shown
> as a square box). On the contray, some Unicode can be shown on Unix,
> such as the Middle dot(u00B7), but cannot be shown on Pc. I don't know
> why, how can I solve this problem?
>
> -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
> (End of Report)
>
>
>



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