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Help: HTML practice
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: JohnInKansas Date: 22 Nov 03 - 06:32 AM Mark - You assume that a significant number of mudcatters read anyone's posts carefully enough to notice a missing schwa here or there? I'm just a simple mechanic, who got into 'puters to get the paperwork out. I've done some DOS, a very little C, and played with some of the BASIC macro functions, but never had much chance to get with op systems other than DOS and Windows. I have been a PostScript enthusiast since I discovered I could make drawings by hand coding. Not too long ago, I had to produce a half-dozen aircraft component development specs, on a tight schedule and with no usable "drafting" facilities, so I hand coded all the drawings in PostScript for insertion into Word documents. Tedious, but it worked beautifully. John |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 22 Nov 03 - 12:57 AM Thanks, John. Actually, hex conversion isn't a problem for me, I've been doing it my head for thirty-five years or so. If I'm feeling lazy, I've any number of hex converters available including my Palm VII. I may be the last living person who can actually read a core dump. My work with fonts tends toward the type one Adobe fonts and Knuth's Computer Modern fonts associated with TeX, LaTeX and Metafont. I use Word (Office XP Pro) for the odd client document but my own preference for nice looking documents is LaTeX. I run teTeX in Cygwin under Win XP Pro and my primary editor is GNU EMACS. I've done Windows MFC development in C and C++ but these days I tend to favor tools that support open development and the ability to target several OSs with a single code base. When PostScript printers were first introduced—but before GUIs came along—I used to hand code PostScript files just to make overhead transparancies that looked nice—a skill that came in handy when I started using a, then new, NeXT Workstation I'm accustomed to specifying octal and hex values in source files and and in regular expressions using the backslash escaping syntax I just don't do enough hard core HTML or to have retained all the details of ampersand character encoding. I am, though, one of a relatively small number of people who've actually used Tim Berners-Lee's original text-only Web browser. Now what Mudcat needs is a help page explaining to users of the older technologies how to configure their systems so they can see schwa characters as Joe begins including them in his posts. - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: JohnInKansas Date: 21 Nov 03 - 11:02 PM Mark - The conversion between hex and decimal is pretty straight forward, but it gets really tedious if you have to do a lot of them - especially if you don't do it often. For some arcane reason, Unicode is standardized on the use of hex character numbers, so you can go to the Unicode standard and find the hex char number for any (known?) character, in virtually any alphabet/language that's been written. The Char Map in Win98 gives you the decimal char number (ANSI) for quite a few characters. The Char Map in WinXP gives you the hex char number (Unicode) for virtually all of them. Theoretically, the WinXP Char Map will show the decimal value, if you "hover" on the character; but it's sometimes a little balky, and the display makes errors (as above) pretty common. If you go to the Windows upgrade center, the Office upgrade center, and the IE center, etc., at Microsoft, you can let the site "survey" your machine and tell you what's available - for current software. Since Win98 is no longer a "supported product," I'm not sure that function is available for it. You should, however, be able to find a list of "available updates/upgrades" that will include some add-ins to allow use of more characters than were available when Win98 was new. There was a separate Win98/IE5 update to add support for the "euro" € character, for example, for US users who didn't get it with their releases. Most of the "tech notes" on character representation seem to have been written when Win2K was relatively new; and they haven't been very will updated to tell what's available for WinXP. Fortunately, much of what you might want is "built-in" in XP. The Tahoma font, used for all the little message boxes, is generally a "full Unicode" font, for Western European (including cyrillic) characters. Most of the fonts that come with XP and corresponding Office suites are at least in the "big font" category, so they'll display most characters. The exceptions are mostly "banner" or "headline" fonts. The thing that's missing in the "normal" Office XP installation is support for "right-to-left" character alignment, and glyphs for the characters in idiographic/pictographic languages (like Chinese, etc.). If you buy your Office XP in a version "localized" for Israel or China (maybe for Japan?), you get those features. Otherwise, there is an add-in; but so far as I've been able to determine, the necessary add-in is only available on XP-Server distribution and/or resource kit disks. Not something accessible to most of us ($$$$$$$). The "Bible" for all this is supposed to be a book called Developing International Software, 2d edition<, in the "Dr. International" Series from Microsoft Press (ISBN 0-7356-1583-7, © 2003). It's horribly expensive, and horribly written, however; so purchase is NOT to be recommended. You might pick up a first edition fairly cheaply, but it's © 1995, so pretty much out of date. The most detailed and reliable information comes from the "Microsoft Developers Network" website, but unless you write code (I don't) and have the Software Developers' Kit (I don't), extracting anything meaningful there is extremely tedious. Most people would be well advised to wait for the movie version. For most users, a check to see if there are IE and Office updates available, particularly updates that include font and/or character set/language upgrades, should be done. With up to date IE, especially, most setups, including Win98, should have at least a couple of fonts that will display the majority of characters you're likely to see on the web (Japanese/Chinese language sites excepted). Trial and error is as useful as any other method for finding which ones you have that will work for you. John |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 21 Nov 03 - 07:22 PM John, As usual, your technical explanation is excellent. Thanks for posting all the answers. I've been too busy to make good on my promise and the detail you prdovided goes well beyond what I would have come up with. And thanks for hex tip. I was unaware that hex values could be used in HTML ampersand encoding. - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Bill D Date: 21 Nov 03 - 05:51 PM thanks, John...that helps a lot to understand why it is so hard to understand..*grin*...I will re-read all that several times... |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: JohnInKansas Date: 21 Nov 03 - 03:52 PM Yeah, my Char Map only displays the decimal when you hover on a character, but when the character is "selected" to show the hex/Unicode number, it enlarges and covers adjacent ones. The hover picked up a "superscript 3" in the line below (Times New Roman) and read me the decimal for it. Decimal character j (06A hex) is actually 0106. A (hex) = 10 (decimal), 60 (hex) = 6*16 (dec) = 96 (dec), 10+96 = 106. j = j j = j Back to my nap. John |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: GUEST,MMario Date: 21 Nov 03 - 03:41 PM that example gives me a superscript "3" and the lower case j |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: JohnInKansas Date: 21 Nov 03 - 03:39 PM Well, not only did I pick an example most people won't be able to see, I mistyped the code as well. A simpler one: the letter j is hex 06A and decimal 0179. You can read both numbers from the WinXP Character Map. ³ should print ³ j should print j If this doesn't work, I'll be off re-reading my O'Reilly. John |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: JohnInKansas Date: 21 Nov 03 - 03:21 PM For those using the Unicode tables to look up characters, note that you can code a character using the hex character number without converting to decimal, if you insert an x after the # in the character code. Mark gave the example of the beh which is decimal 387 and hex 183: ƃ (decimal) should print · ƃ (hex) should print the same ƃ Win98 was built back in ancient times when large font sets weren't too much used. It is limited, by its word length, unless a programmer deliberately incorporates DWORD (double word) characters into specific functions. It takes 32 bits(or is it just 16?) to represent all of the Unicode character numbers, and Win98 isn't equipped to do that. To some extent with Win2K, and fully with WinXP, the ability to use true Unicode fonts is available; but it's not a recommended practice except where necessary because of the very large size of full Unicode fonts. Windows operates from "Code Pages" that contain instructions for how it responds to each given instruction. One of the things that's included in the code pages is the instruction for how to replace a given character number with a glyph - i.e. a graphic that displays the "character" in a selected font - for screen display. The setup of the machine, and the fonts selected, will determine which (of literally thousands) of possible code pages are loaded. Windows can flip through the pages that are loaded, to see whether it can represent an unusual character - is there a glyph for it in another code page - but it can only use the pages it has up. [Persons with ancient experience will recall adding ANSISYS to their Autoexec.bat or Config.sys file to load the page for the ANSI, or "Extended ASCII" characters in the good old days – which did nothing but load an additional code page with glyphs for character numbers above decimal 064.] Microsoft has produced a number of what they call "big fonts," that load additional code pages to permit display of characters that are not commonly used. Most of these contain glyphs only for "Western European" alphabets (with a few spares thrown in to fill out the pages). NONE of them contain a full Unicode character set. With some limitations, Win98 can use "big font" pages, but you have to go get them - almost on purpose. Win98 users who happen to have them most likely got them with an IE upgrade, since it's the program displaying the document that determines what the characters should look like. Some "big fonts" may have been included in Office updates, but it's a little tricky to say what's available. Win98 is obsolete, and is NOT fully supported, and the Office versions commonly used with it may, or may not, have similar status. Update tools for identifying what you can add may not be readily available. Existing downloads are mostly still there, at Microsoft's download site(s) but you may have to figure out for yourself what you want. A particular problem arises from Microsoft's failure to rename the newer "big fonts." There is no simple way, in Win98, to tell whether a given font, such as Times New Roman, is on your machine in the "old" version or in the "big font" version. Most Unicode fonts will include "Unicode" or "UC" in the font name, but even that is not guaranteed. An additional difficulty comes from the "Internationalization" of Windows and Windows applications. Those who purchase their Windows in Germany will get a different set of code pages than those who get theirs in the UK, which is in turn different than what you get in the US. In general, the characters each can use is pretty much the same, but they may be arranged differently on the code pages to facilitate access to the characters most frequently used, in the language expected to be most often used. If you see the little rectangle, it's because – in the font you're using to view the document, the "little rectangle" IS THE GLYPH used by that font to represent the character number called for in the document. Nothing that can be done to the document will make that character number show a different glyph. If you want to see something else there, you must change to a display font that associates some other "picture" with that character number on the machine displaying the document. The only real problem is in figuring out which of the fonts you have, or can get, uses that different picture. John |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 21 Nov 03 - 01:27 PM The Cyrillic character beh looks like Б in the New Times Roman font. (U+0411 = Б for HTML purposes.) - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 21 Nov 03 - 01:20 PM Bill, You've just described the Cyrillic character known as beh. - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Bill D Date: 21 Nov 03 - 12:56 PM 387 is a funny large thing like a lowercase 'b' with the vertical line bent 90° to the right....(I just picked those #s at random to see what would happen) Į ş ė ʼn |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 21 Nov 03 - 12:07 PM The character ƃ is hex 0183 in the font tables. My reference to the Unicode tables above shows this character as the character beh from the Cyrillic alphabet. This displays as an unknown character (rectangle) on my system as well. I have Cyrillic fonts on my system but I don't use them as default for Web browsing. Bill D indicated above that he uses the Microsoft font called Georgia as his default but that font has the beh character at U+0411 (as does Times New Roman), not U+0183. Curiouser and curiouser. - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Snuffy Date: 21 Nov 03 - 09:04 AM Bill, My box at work (the one which shows schwas) shows #355 as a t with a comma below, #279 as an e with a dot above, #299 as i with a bar above and #333 as o with a bar above. But #387 just displays as a box; what should it be? And the one at home will probably just show 5 boxes |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Bill D Date: 20 Nov 03 - 08:52 PM ƃ ţ ė ī ō |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Bill D Date: 20 Nov 03 - 08:49 PM ..but where on my computer is the code that tells it to display Ə or ə ? And why do some fonts work and some don't? And why do I see them, even when those fonts are not specified? |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Joe Offer Date: 20 Nov 03 - 05:32 AM Ə displays as Ə (majuscule schwa) and ə displays as ə (minuscule schwa) |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Snuffy Date: 19 Nov 03 - 07:08 PM I can see them with Lucida Sans Unicode, but they go back to boxes with Times |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Bill D Date: 19 Nov 03 - 11:47 AM VERY interrrresting! I have 4 Lucida fonts (sans, handwriting, console, and typewriter), but not Unicode, and none of them are set as defaults anywhere..yet I see the schwaren always..Maybe it is Divine intervention..or Immaculate Punctuation ...."Oh, Thou Font of Every Schwaring" |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Noreen Date: 19 Nov 03 - 07:33 AM I saw the schwa, I saw the schwa! Thanks for that Jeri- I converted to Lucida Sans Unicode and schwaren now appear. I'll change back now tho- no time to play with other fonts at the mo. Interrrresting! |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Bill D Date: 18 Nov 03 - 11:14 PM as a matter of interest, I have Win98II, and the schwa displays fine in both Opera and Mozilla browsers....but I don't understand where it is stored...I don't see it in either of the fonts I have as default, nor is it in the Symbols font, as some things are... Where I DO find it is in a font called Grolier 2...here is a screen capture of part of that font, with the schwa at position 39. (lots of strange characters in it!) It will be interesting to see what Mark comes up with as the key to the whole thing...that is, why I see it and Snuffy only sees it at work and why the fonts don't seem to make the difference.. |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Bill D Date: 18 Nov 03 - 10:20 PM well...for what it's worth, I have Win98II, and I just checked using the Mozilla browser, and it shows just fine there, too...'twill be interesting to see what the key is.. |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 18 Nov 03 - 09:26 PM I got my Win 98 machine put back together and found I was seeing little boxes instead of “schwaren.” Maybe tomorrow I'll have time to look for a solution for Win 98. - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Snuffy Date: 18 Nov 03 - 09:06 PM I can see them at work (Win2K, IE 6.0) but not at home (Win98, IE5.5). Both using Times New Roman. |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Bill D Date: 18 Nov 03 - 06:11 PM I am using Opera browser, and it has MANY confusing font settings. You can, if you work it out, have different fonts for every heading and display area...I have 'most'header stuff set to Times New Roman, but my basic (what I am reading in the messages) text font is Georgia, which come with Windows, and probably has schwa support... One of these days, I am gonna see just what I can do with the settings, so I can control it all... |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Watson Date: 18 Nov 03 - 11:05 AM Doesn't have to be that font - maybe you can find a font you like that has the special characters. Try a few. |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: GUEST,MMario Date: 18 Nov 03 - 10:55 AM but I detest that font - so I'll just switch around when I need special characters. |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: GUEST,MMario Date: 18 Nov 03 - 10:34 AM yup - that works. |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Jeri Date: 18 Nov 03 - 10:18 AM Bill, it DOES matter if you have 360 fonts installed. I got the wee boxes, then I switched my browser's default font to Lucida Sans Unicode and I saw the schwa. (I saw the schwa, I saw the schwa, no more boxes with me saying 'duh', now I'm so happy, cuz boxes are 'blah', Praise the Lord, I saw the schwa) Anyway... MSIE, Tools, Internet Options, 'Font' button (at the bottom) and mess with 'web page font' on the left side. |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Watson Date: 18 Nov 03 - 06:38 AM I'm with Noreen on this one - small rectangular boxes. I'm using Windows 2000 professional. It does make a difference, however, what you set the default font to on your browser. If I change to Times New Roman it's OK, as is Arial. My previous setting of Arial Narrow doesn't seem to include the schwa. |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 18 Nov 03 - 02:43 AM I found a Microsoft Knowledge Base Article on Unicode that may be helpful. It looks as though Win 95 and 98 may not have full support for Unicode character sets. My own Win 98 system isn't connected right now. I'll connect it tomorrow and see how it behaves with these characters. - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Noreen Date: 18 Nov 03 - 01:45 AM Yep- it says Times new Roman and Courier New are used by my browser. I looked up character map, but no schwa visible for Times New Roman or Courier New- where should it be? |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 18 Nov 03 - 01:23 AM Just another note on the subject of schwa characters. I got curious about the font question and started looking through my fonts. The font called Times New Roman, a Unicode font, contains both of the schwa characters I posted above. I used the charmap program (Start->Run->charmap) to view the characters and found the characters at U+018F and U+0259 as specified. Below this, I'll simply paste those characters in from my charmap display, without any ampersand coding, and you can see if that makes a difference. If not, you might look to see that your browser is using the Times New Roman font as a default.Ə əI should note that as I type this post into the Mudcat post box, I see the correct characters I'm pasting even though my typing is displayed in a font I take to be Courier New. My charmap display indicates that Courier New is also a Unicode font and includes the subject characters.- Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Noreen Date: 18 Nov 03 - 01:04 AM Windows 98, IE 6.0 Before (majuscule schwa) and (minuscule schwa) I see a rectangular box. |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 18 Nov 03 - 01:01 AM Sorry, Noreen, I started my post before you described what you see. I am curious about your OS and browser though. Still, the boxes you describe suggest that you may not have a font that contains a schwa character. Another possibility is that your OS doesn't support Unicode character sets. ‘38’ isn't a font specification. In the example, I coded the leading ampersand as & so it wouldn't be seen by browsers as a valid character code. I wanted to show the coding without having it interpreted. - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 18 Nov 03 - 12:46 AM I should note that I'm using Windows XP Professional SP1 with everything up to date and Internet Explorer 6.0 also fully up to date. Netscape is a nice browser too but around five years ago I found there was no longer any need to take up disk space with two browsers and since IE was required in my work, I dropped Netscape. Of course I wouldn't have submitted my post above if I hadn't tested it and verified that the schwa characters displayed correctly on my own system. Character set support is part of the the HTML specification. If developers of a browser product choose not to implement the complete specification—found at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) site—then I guess that's an issue between the developer and their customer base. Noreen, What OS and browser do you use? And what do you see displayed above in my post purporting to display schwa characters? - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Bill D Date: 18 Nov 03 - 12:41 AM hmmm...I only have 360 odd fonts installed..and several thousand more in reserve and on disk..*grin*...but no font is specified in Mark's post that I can see..unless '38' is a font.. I do see the schwazzzz, tho! |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Noreen Date: 18 Nov 03 - 12:31 AM Nah, I get two rectangular boxes where the schwas should be in Mark's post. Could this be because I don't have 547 different fonts available on my computer as you do, Bill? :0) (There must be a better plural than schwas. Schwaren?) |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Bill D Date: 18 Nov 03 - 12:21 AM it doesn't, Noreen? It did in Mark's post..maybe you need a primer in Schwabian ;>} |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Noreen Date: 17 Nov 03 - 11:49 PM Oh no it doesn't .... |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 17 Nov 03 - 11:35 PM Voila! This turned out to be much easier than I first thought. The codes given for the Unicode characters is in hexadecimal (base 16) notation. Converting the code 018F from hexadecimal to decimal yields 399 and converting the code 0259 to decimal yields 601.Ergo…Happy coding. - Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Mark Clark Date: 17 Nov 03 - 07:51 PM Coding for the schwa character may be found on page 3 of the document on the Unicode Latin Extended-B character set at the Unicode Home Page site. The coding is given as 018F for the majuscule (capital) and 0259 for the minuscule. I haven't played with the HTML but I assume you need to specify the charactger set in a <font> tag set.- Mark |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: John Routledge Date: 17 Nov 03 - 05:41 PM testing testing http://mudcat.com works? |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: John Routledge Date: 17 Nov 03 - 05:38 PM http://www.yha.co.uk |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Bill D Date: 17 Nov 03 - 05:22 PM http://www.mikmaq.com/language/extendedcharacters.html |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Watson Date: 17 Nov 03 - 01:19 PM Very useful Nigel, but it doesn't answer Joe's query. I don't believe there is a code for a schwa (looks like an upside down e) If you look at on-line dictionaries with pronunciation guides, where a schwa indicates a neutral vowel, a gif is always used to represent the character. |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Nigel Parsons Date: 17 Nov 03 - 07:24 AM Joe: See ASCII Table it should inlude what you require, in Octal Hex & HTML Nigel |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: Joe Offer Date: 17 Nov 03 - 02:06 AM OK, so what's the ampersand code for a schwa? -Joe Offer- |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: *daylia* Date: 14 Feb 03 - 10:38 AM OK, feelin better now ... |
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Subject: RE: Help: HTML practice From: GUEST Date: 14 Feb 03 - 10:19 AM There go. |
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