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International Characters

Every single character; letter, number, punctuation etc..., is represented by a number in your computer. When you press a key on your keyboard you send your computer a specific number which it then maps to a specific character and displays them on screen. The way your computer maps these numbers to characters varies from language to language and from computer to computer. The mapping is determined by using an 'Encoding' which the computer applies to a string of text in order to interpret it. Examples of different Encodings include ASCII, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, Unicode and hundreds more. Which means that typing a ©, ®, ¥, etc.. may not show up as those characters on different operating systems or for users of different languages. To solve this problem, and the way we were able to make those characters in the preceding sentence always show up correctly, is by using HTML Entities.

HTML Entities provide the browser with a special code in order to interpret special characters the same way no matter what browser or encoding is used. For example, to display those special characters above (characters with a numerical ascii code greater than 127), we use © to represent ©, ® to represent ®, and ¥ to represent ¥. There are a whole list of codes to represent all other special characters. WebDesign provides a list of all these code in its HTML Entities Window. These special characters can be represented by their entity name, which was used in the preceding example, their decimal value, or their hexadecimal value. All these codes are available from the Entities window. Go to the Window menu and select 'HTML Entities' and the following window will appear;

List of all HTML Entities

Use the HTML Entities window to quickly insert an HTML Entities into your document. HTML Entities insure that not so common characters always show up correctly no matter what operating system or web browser you are using.

WebDesign can automatically convert special characters when they are typed in your document to their correct entity name. You can use this feature by enabling it under the 'Edit Modes' tab in the Preferences window. Just select the Document Mode that you want WebDesign to convert entities as you type and select 'Convert to Entity Name' from the popupmenu. It is already selected for you when in HTML or XHTML mode.

WebDesign can convert your entire document from regular text to IS0-Latin-1 (HTML Entitie Names) and to IS0-8859-1 and back. You can access these conversion features in the 'Convert' sub menu under the 'Text' menu.

Note: It is up to you when to use the entity name, entity decimal value or entity hexadecimal value. Support for each entity value is excellent in most browsers.

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