greek char in UTF-8 (part 2)

Thank you to all the persons who took their time to share their thoughts
and advices with my problem concerning the transmission of greek characters
in utf-8. 

I still have a couple of questions and comments.

First, what is the recommended Formal Public Identifier for the charset ? 

Is it:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=UNICODE-1-1-UTF-8">
or
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;  charset=UTF-8">  ??

Second, I had to abandon the idea of embedding a font using WEFT font
embedder, because, as I understand it, it works only with Internet Explorer
and I must insure that I have the most interoperable document, which will
display well on any platform, anywhere.

>There are a couple of odd things, firstly the doctype is wrong (this isn't
>a frameset) and secondly, there is absolutely no need to use UTF-8 for this
>content, becase in fact it only uses ascii. All other characters, suchas
>accented letters and greek, are done usingentities or NCRs.

Chris, you were right, my doctype was wrong; only the first file 
( http://www.bibl.ulaval.ca/doelec/theses/memoires/1999/ChRiviere/riv.htm )
is a frameset, I corrected the others. Secondly, *SOME* of my greek
characters are not ASCII, otherwise they would all display well in any
font, which is not the case. Concerning NCR (Numeric character reference, I
presume), if you look at the source of my file, you will see some NCR that
are below 256 (by ex. &#233; ) thus, ISO-Latin; but many are over 256, thus
unicode. So I must send this in UTF-8, must I ?

My problem was not to display the text on MY computer, my problem was to
insure that the text will be displayed the most efficiently in other
computers. In fact, I had trouble finding a computer which couldn't display
my document correctly (fortunately a secretary near my desk has an old
computer ;- )    )

I really appreciate your explanation: if I copy my text from the web and
paste it in an application that can display it, I will see the correct text
because the text will have been correctly transmitted. 
Like Andrew suggests, installing the Pan-European language support gives us
more up to date versions of Fonts which  will then be available to other
applications
I think, following these discussions that I will continue to use UTF-8 to
encode the texts which are not only ASCII because, if these texts are not
always displayable now they will be in the near future, as softwares and OS
are being upgraded. (hopefully)


One last question, 
As most of my text is ISO-LATIN and -- if I remember well the stats
produced by Weft -- only 228 characters are UTF-8.  Is it preferable to
send anyway all the files using UTF-8 or is it possible to embed in the
text a coding commanding a switch to UTF-8 in a specific portion of the
text ? (something like:  <DIV charset="UTF8> is it possible ???)

Once again thanks to all of you, your comments were really helpful.







Guy.Teasdale
Bibliothèque de l'Université Laval, Sainte-Foy, Québec G1K 7P4
TÉL: (418) 656-2131 - 2090 FAX: (418) 656-7897
http://www.bibl.ulaval.ca/info/pagepers/teasdale/

Received on Monday, 8 May 2000 15:32:23 UTC