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19 Oct 11 - 05:31 AM (#3241164) Subject: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: Richard Bridge The pound sign (£) comes up as a question mark in topic headings. Is there a way to insert it as a character. Or should I be concerned that anti-brit discrimination is afoot? (This is English humour, just to make it clear) |
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19 Oct 11 - 05:43 AM (#3241166) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling - £ From: McGrath of Harlow Comes up as a £ when I do it. |
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19 Oct 11 - 06:03 AM (#3241172) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: MGM·Lion £££ from keyboard £££₤₤₤ from special alternative keyboard Just testing ~~ let's see what posts press submit ~~~~ |
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19 Oct 11 - 06:05 AM (#3241173) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: MGM·Lion Hmm ~ looks OK to me from an What computers are you guys using? ~M~ |
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19 Oct 11 - 06:22 AM (#3241182) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: JohnInKansas On my (US) keyboard, with NumLock turned on, typing 0163 on the numpad should enter it into a Word doc, and in some browsers it will work in places like the Reply box here. £ In HTML you can enter it as £ . £ The Unicode Value for the character is the hexadecimal number 00A3, which you can enter in HTML as £ . £ You should also (in HTML) be able to use the "character entity" £ to display it here. £ (Note that all of the above (except the Numpad method) codes end with a semicolon ";" that must be included.) Keyboards "regionalized" for different parts of the world place various keys in different places, and the keyboard key should insert a proper character, but inserting infrequently used glyphs using the "Insert Symbol" utility in Word (and some other word processors) sometimes uses a "phony" character number (from a local machine character map) that gives inconsistent results in HTML and in publishing layout programs. (It appears that some Mac versions consistently insert a "phony symbol" with some shortcut that's fairly common, but since Mac users won't admit they're "a little different" it's hard to get them to discuss it.) If you can figure out which "nationalized" keyboard you have, you can probably still search for "International keyboards" and find the Microsoft utility that shows the key layout for each of the 128+ different keyboards that are "standardized." You might get lucky and find that your keyboard has a key for it - possibly as a "Shift" or "Alt" key pair. Since your Windows version (if that's what you use) is probably regionalized for the same area as your keyboard, your Word Help file may give you some additional clues, although Microsoft has apparently attempted to remove anything useful in later versions. A search on "Keyboard" (in Help) has worked in older versions. John |
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19 Oct 11 - 06:29 AM (#3241187) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: Richard Bridge Example thread.cfm?threadid=140950&messages=1 This looks mudcat-specific. I'm running XPand the post was made using Chrome as the browser. |
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19 Oct 11 - 06:32 AM (#3241189) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: GUEST,Jon The only safe method for the pound sign here is the HTML codes. |
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19 Oct 11 - 06:41 AM (#3241191) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: GUEST,Woodsie The £ symbols look fine on the above link Richard - have you tried another browser? I'm using firefow I will try again later with chrome (on netbook) |
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19 Oct 11 - 06:47 AM (#3241196) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: GUEST,Woodsie No - I take that back -OK on the actual link but in the list of thread tiltles it is a white ? on a blue diamond background - as are some other characters in thread titles!!! |
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19 Oct 11 - 07:10 AM (#3241203) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: GUEST,Jon re the browser differences: As far as I can see, there is no character encoding set on Mudcat pages. With the thread listing (threads.cfm), Firefox seems to be "defaulting" to Latin-1 and Chrome to utf-8 on my Linux PC. Using the HTML codes for symbols like the pound sign will avoid this and other character encoding/translation problems. |
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19 Oct 11 - 07:14 AM (#3241204) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: GUEST Any method that enters it looking like a pound sign on the edit window WILL come out wrong on some computers. £is all you need to know. |
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19 Oct 11 - 07:20 AM (#3241208) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: artbrooks I generally cut-and-paste from the Windows "character set": ££££ |
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19 Oct 11 - 08:31 AM (#3241239) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: JohnInKansas In the list of threads, the page code shows that the character entered is HEX 003F, or decimal 063, which is the correct Unicode character value for a question mark. HEX 003F coded as ? gives ? Decimal 063 coded as &063; gives ? How it gets from the character at Decimal 063, Hex 003F in the title in the list of hreads to the correct character number Decimal 163, Hex 00A3 in the individual posts is a mystery to me. There was comment/complaint about people using oddball characters in thread names that made searching difficult. If a selection of allowed chars, that omits the £ character, has been implemented as a filter in the "Create Thread" application to prevent odd chars, that might explain something (but not necessarily this error?) but I haven't heard that anything of the sort was done. John |
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19 Oct 11 - 08:40 AM (#3241253) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: JohnInKansas Another thread where something similar happens is at Obit Muiris Ó Rocháin, W.C.S.S. where the Ó and á are replaced by "unknown" chars in the list of threads - but appear correctly in the thread. John |
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19 Oct 11 - 08:52 AM (#3241257) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: Richard Bridge Has anyone tried Hex 00A3 in a title in the list of threads to see what happens? |
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19 Oct 11 - 11:04 AM (#3241330) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: GUEST ££££££ http://www.deeproot.co.uk/extrakeys.html ýÿéèæöœœ££££££‡‡Ññ™™©®¢€€Ã‰‰§¶¼½¾®©™™óÞÞÿýß Oh for a musical 'flat' symbol |
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19 Oct 11 - 11:07 AM (#3241334) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: Richard Bridge Dear Guest - you miss the point. Have you looked at the HEADINGS of the threads that demonstrate the issue? |
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19 Oct 11 - 12:10 PM (#3241370) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: Newport Boy I think it's a Mudcat oddity. The thread title displays the £ correctly when the thread is opened. The encoding on this page is ISO-8859-1. In the list of threads it displays as garbage. The encoding on this page is UTF-8. I can't see why the encoding defined by the 2 pages should be different, but it is. If I switch encodings, I can choose garbage or £. I'm using Firefox 4 in Linux on this netbook, and entering this reply using ISO-8859-1. Phil |
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19 Oct 11 - 12:29 PM (#3241377) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: GUEST,Jon It seemes to have changed since I posted earlier. At that time, Firefox (7 on Linux) was displaying the pound sign correctly. Now it isn't and is showing utf-8. |
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19 Oct 11 - 12:38 PM (#3241382) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for £ From: treewind Testing... (see header) By the way Richard, GUEST above was me - not noticing loss of cookie. It seems that £ works in headers too... |
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19 Oct 11 - 03:41 PM (#3241484) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: JohnInKansas I had the impression that whatever encoding was set in my browser was used for all pages I viewed. As Newport Boy comments, I don't see any reason why two pages should use a different encoding. I found that the Index thread showing the list of threads was displaying "Unicode (UTF-8)" in my browser, and there were numerous broken characters in the list. The characters displayed correctly in threads, which were using the "Western European (Windows)" encoding. Changing the thread listing page to Western European (Windows) encoding displays the characters correctly, and changing this thread page to Unicode (UTF-8) produced the same broken characters for the £. My IE gives two dozen different encodings to choose from, a fair percentage of which I would expect to use only for pages mostly in languages that, for me, would be "unusual" (and unintelligible). Other theads have discussed that Unicode requires "double-byte" representation of character numbers in order to represent all the characters defined by the Unicode Standard(s), while most other encodings get by with single-byte numbers. This may explain why the characters look different if a different encoding is selected, but doesn't explain why my browser was using two different encodings for the Index page and for the threads. In IE, the "Encoding" setting is in the "View" section of the toolbar (View|Encoding). It would appear that people with other browsers may have the same need to play with the encoding, but someone who uses one of the others will have to help find the setting if anyone has a problem as I don't attempt to keep up with them all. Regardless of how you type it, any correct method of entering the £ should record the number 163 (decimal) or 00A3 (hex) in the page script. The encoding used by the one reading the page determines what number is sent to (read by) your browser, and for some encodings your browser gets a wrong number. The incorrect character number may (rarely?) display some other character, or more often will just show whatever glyph (usually just a blank rectangle) the selected font uses for "unknown" characters. Since the aberrant behavior comes from your browser settings, it's not just a Mudcat thing so you might expect to encounter similar behavior on other web sites if you have set the browser to "do it wrong" for the page you're viewing. It may(?) be possible for an HTML Header or a CSS to call for a specific encoding, and some pages might be able to tell your browser what to use for the page it delivers, but I haven't seen many websites that use such a feature visibly. (And for now I'm too lazy to look up more of what a site designer can do to us.) John |
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19 Oct 11 - 04:14 PM (#3241505) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: Jack Campin I think some browsers will attempt to guess the character encoding and may not even get the same result when visiting Mudcat a second time. Whatever artbrooks and Newport Boy were trying is lost on me, I just see black diamonds with question marks. £ is the way to go. £ |
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19 Oct 11 - 04:44 PM (#3241526) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: GUEST,Jon I think some browsers will attempt to guess the character encoding and may not even get the same result when visiting Mudcat a second time. That's what seems to be happening here. Either that or there is more than one version of the page that can be served or someone's changed the page a few times today... |
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19 Oct 11 - 05:47 PM (#3241560) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: treewind Mudcat pages don't announce a character encoding, though I noticed on looking at this one that there was a meta tag specifying UTF-8 but it's been commented out. The problem for Mudcat is that the pages are written by posters using different character encodings, so whatever it specifies in the page header won't necessarily be true. *** Ah - the threads LIST does say UTF-8 - so that could explain why titles show differently on the list from on the thread itself. |
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19 Oct 11 - 06:06 PM (#3241570) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: GUEST,Jon I don't know whether this is a Firefox 7 issue but the Mudcat main page is changing for me. Have a look at this snapshot I've just taken. |
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19 Oct 11 - 06:35 PM (#3241588) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: Jack Campin It's intriguing that neither of the windows in Jon's snapshot shows things working right. The lower window has the copyright and e-acute signs in the footer messed up, the upper one has the pound signs in the thread titles wrong. Max - © for © and é for é. |
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20 Oct 11 - 06:57 AM (#3241783) Subject: RE: Tech: Sign for pound sterling From: Newport Boy Another observation - I usually have encoding auto-detection in Firefox set 'off'. When I change this to 'universal' the detected encoding of the message page in Richard's thread is changed from Western (ISO-8859-1) to Western (Windows 1252). I think these are almost identical, but it's another complication in a complex subject. This whole topic doesn't bother me much - if I come across a page which displays text incorrectly, and I think it's worth reading, I temporarily switch the encoding. In Firefox, it's only 2 or 3 mouse clicks to choose from 50 or so encodings. I don't know about IE, not having used it since Win95. Phil |
