Re: a simple question about characters with macrons from Erik van der Poel on 2000-02-28 (www-international@w3.org from January to March 2000)

From: Erik van der Poel <erik@netscape.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2000 09:24:53 -0800
To: Martin Mueller <martinmueller@nwu.edu>
CC: Misha Wolf <misha.wolf@reuters.com>, www-international@w3.org
Message-ID: <38BAAF65.3369E7B9@netscape.com>

Martin Mueller wrote:
> 
> That works well enough, but a more elegant solution would be to use e and o
> with a macron, that is Unicode  0113, 0112, 014d, 014c. These characters
> appear on my Windows NT machine character map (which is the source of all
> my wisdom on the subject) as part of the Latin Extended A keyboard.
> 
> I assume there are entity references for those characters. But do these
> characters travel as dependably over the net and are they likely to be
> rendered properly by all versions of Netscape and Microsoft browsers
> version 4 and up?

There are no CERs (Character Entity References) for those characters in
HTML4 as far as I know, but the decimal NCRs (Numeric Character
References) and hexadecimal NCRs for those characters are as follows:

  Unicode  Dec NCR  Hex NCR
  U+0113   &#275;   &#x113;
  U+0112   &#274;   &#x112;
  U+014D   &#333;   &#x14D;
  U+014C   &#332;   &#x14C;

Note that Netscape 4.X does not support hex NCRs. Also, the decimal NCRs
only work when the document's "charset" is UTF-8:

In HTTP (preferred):

  Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

Or in HTML (if you can't do HTTP):

  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

The Windows version of Netscape 4.X will work, as long as the user has
the appropriate fonts already installed. I'm not sure about the Mac
version. The Unix version probably won't work, since it doesn't have
very extensive font support.

Erik

Received on Monday, 28 February 2000 12:28:20 UTC