Re: Html character entities

On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 02:18:16PM -0600, Conrad Knauer wrote:
> On 2/6/07, Keith Brown <brownk@chem4823.usask.ca> wrote:
>
> > I've been having an on-off battle with these little beasts for a while
> >now as part of a technical web page that I'm developing. In a nutshell
> >what I want to do is include 'special' characters in the page ... mostly
> >Greek letters and a few math symbols. If I use "&rho;" (or the numerical
> >equivalent) I can see it using Firefox on my laptop and one of my office
> >machines (both Slackware 11) but not using Firefox on my other office
> >machine or my home machine (both Slackware 10.2). The web explanations of
> >these things are confusing and obtuse to say the least.
> >
> > Can anyone supply a simple explanation of these things ... a sort of
> >"Character entities for dummies" type of thing? What can I do to get them
> >working on the machines that currently don't display them or, more
> >importantly, on the machines of those will be viewing these web pages?
>
> On the computers where its working, under:
>
> View -> Character Encoding
>
> Which is selected? (maybe Unicode?)
> Is it different for the ones that aren't?
>
> In the HTML you can add a line near the top like this:
>
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Conrad is close. To start, you need to select a character set that includes
the characters you want displayed, utf-8 is certainly not what you want
for greek or math sybmols. With the desired character set specified, you
are then at the mercy of the browser understanding the particular entities
you use and the visitor having that character set available to them.

If accurate rendering is important, then I'd say use something other than
a web page (like a PDF document or a graphic).
Received on Tue Feb 6 14:36:33 2007