There is no simple way to use extended characters in an html post that will work for all those who view the page.

What one sees is determined by the computer setup of the one looking at the page. Without "exotic" coding, it makes little difference what the one POSTING the page does.

Computers, particularly Windows ones, are REGIONALIZED. The default fonts, keyboards, and languages are different, depending on where you bought your machine. The keyboard a UK user sits in front of has different characters, in different locations, than the keyboard a US user has. A French keyboard is quite a bit different than either of those.

The "whole story" on all this is supposedly laid out in the Microsoft Press manual Developing International Software. For the Second Edition even Microsoft couldn't figure out a way to have the typesetters just type the characters, so one artist made "artwork" of the individual "foreign" characters that had to be pasted in as "pictures."

A first problem is that a given "font" may exist in several versions. Something called "Times New Roman" may be on one machine with only the ASCII 256 character set, on another machine in an "extended set" with about twice as many characters, and on a third machine in a "full Unicode" character set. Even the "full Unicode Times New Roman" comes in versions that are capable of right-to-left display and versions that are not. Top-to-bottom layout is another problem for some languages.

In a computer, the character "glyphs" are stored in "code page conversion tables." The default code pages again are "regionalized" depending on where you are and what language you speak. It is not generally possible to have code pages loaded for "all languages" at a given time, and loading more than you actually need can bog down your RAM.

You can choose which code pages are loaded in Windows in Control Panel at "Regional and Language Options." Some of the code pages in WinXP are fixed preloads and can not be changed. The fixed preloads are determined, once again, by where you are and what "language" was installed when the machine was new, or on where you bought your OS. (You probably will need to log in with Administrator privileges to make changes there.)

Note that loading a "strange" code page may cause some characters to appear in a different place on your keyboard, and the locations may change if you "switch fonts," so some caution is advised.

The "protocol" you set in your browser will have some effect on what characters are displayed on html pages. UTF-8 is pretty standard, but some users may have reasons for using something else.

Users with older versions of Windows (Win98SE and WinME) have very limited ability to use "extended font sets." Win2K has most of the mechanisms, but may be balky about settings. WinXP can "do it all" but getting appropriate fonts and other utilities may be difficult. Much of the chrome and go-fast stripes for all this is available only as a separate add-on available only to users of a post-WinXP Server version of Windows, although most of it can be "ported" from there to individual WinXP machines.

"Works for me" and "Doesn't work for me" exchanges provide very little information without a specification of:

1. Where you are (to allow a guess about how your machine is regionalized)
2. The browser encoding you use (UTF-8 usually?)
3. The "Language" set on your browzer.
4. The font used on your browser
5. The "Regional setting" you're using in Control Panel

Additional differences may require knowing what browser you're using and identification of a specific code page in your machine setup, if that code page is required for what you're trying to do.

John