[FX.php List] Problem with text formatting

[Kevin Futter]

On 15/8/07 10:39 AM, "Bob Patin" <bob at patin.com> wrote:

> After spending 27 hours on a project for a firm that does Japanese
> translation work, they're now telling me that they're unable to use
> the UTF-8 encoding that I used on all their forms.
> 
> According to my client, if we use UTF-8 on the forms, they'll not
> show properly on some Windows machines. Is this true?
> 
> I'm using this tag:
> 
> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
> 
> My client wants to use:
> 
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
> charset=Shift_JIS" />
> 
> When I try to use his META tag, the forms don't process, and I get a
> 958 error (I think that was the #).
> 
> Has anyone had any experience with this? I'm now worried that they're
> going to stiff me on almost $2000 outstanding, so this is a serious
> situation.
> 
> Any help would be greatly appreciated...

Bob,

The Shift_JIS encoding has been entirely superseded by Unicode, and contains
all necessary characters for display the Japanese character set. It is
possible however that you might need to use UTF-16, as Japanese character
encoding is double-byte. I'm not sure that FileMaker will understand either
encoding though.

Also remember what I said about the difference between the content of a meta
element and the actual document encoding. You can't switch from UTF-8 to
Shift_JIS unless you re-encode the document as Shift_JIS. You're effectively
telling the browser to process the document as Shift_JIS when it isn't. The
meta element is merely a label (like all meta data), but it needs to be
accurate.

Here's one of the better articles around on the whole Unicode thing:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

-- 
Kevin Futter
Webmaster, St. Bernard's College
http://www.sbc.melb.catholic.edu.au/




#####################################################################################
This e-mail message has been scanned for Viruses and Content and cleared 
by MailMarshal
#####################################################################################

This e-mail and any attachments may be confidential. You must not disclose or use the information in this e-mail if you are not the intended recipient. If you have received this e-mail in error, please notify us immediately and delete the e-mail and all copies. The College does not guarantee that this e-mail is virus or error free.  The attached files are provided and may only be used on the basis that the user assumes all responsibility for any loss, damage or consequence resulting directly or indirectly from the use of the attached files, whether caused by the negligence of the sender or not. The content and opinions in this e-mail are not necessarily those of the College.