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Is there a best character encoding setting for en.Wikipedia?

  • 3 replies
  • 1 has this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by knorretje

Nopy
Nopy
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I have Firefox 8.0, with default UTF-8 character encoding (but have tried seemingly all others, none of which resolve certain characters on Wikipedia.) I know character encoding is complex relative to various changing standards, but doesn’t en.Wikipedia have a standard characters set that I can then select in Firefox?

(e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_%28letter%29 - U+1090C, U+13216, U+0F56 U+0F7C U+0F51 – etc.)

I have to copy and convert glyphs via a site like this - http://www.rishida.net/tools/conversion/ - and then lookup the Unicode character values via a site like this - http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1090c/index.htm

Is there a better way? (Thank you for your time!)

I have Firefox 8.0, with default UTF-8 character encoding (but have tried seemingly all others, none of which resolve certain characters on Wikipedia.) I know character encoding is complex relative to various changing standards, but doesn’t en.Wikipedia have a standard characters set that I can then select in Firefox? (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_%28letter%29 - U+1090C, U+13216, U+0F56 U+0F7C U+0F51 – etc.) I have to copy and convert glyphs via a site like this - http://www.rishida.net/tools/conversion/ - and then lookup the Unicode character values via a site like this - http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1090c/index.htm Is there a better way? (Thank you for your time!)

Chosen solution

If you do not see those characters then you need to install a font.

𐤌 𓈖 བ ོ ད

Read this answer in context 👍 0

All Replies (3)

cor-el
cor-el
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  • Top 10 Contributor
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Chosen Solution

If you do not see those characters then you need to install a font.

𐤌 𓈖 བ ོ ད

Modified by cor-el

Nopy
Nopy Question owner
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I don’t understand that. (Me not so smart.) If there is a standardized Unicode value associated with glyph X, then how is it that none of the Unicode character sets in Firefox abide? Add a font? As I understand it, a font is just a re-representation of known characters. It seems like I’m hearing that not only does there have to be a character set decode of the data I’m viewing, but also a font that takes that Unicode value and translates it to something visual. That doesn’t wash. Between databases data is converted to and fro, irrespective of OS/App fonts installed. Sybase <-> Oracle doesn’t need a font installed. Viewing from SQL I don’t need a font installed.

But – thank you cor-el for effectively resolving my problem – even if I don’t understand the logic. Thank you for taking the time to reply!

knorretje
knorretje
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Most fonts only have a limited number of glyphs for a specific range of Unicode codepoints. So if some characters are missing it usually means that the current font simply does not have a glyph for it. So you need another font like cor-el suggested.
The encoding only decides how the raw stream of bytes is converted to codepoints. It is not related do displaying things. The best encoding depends on the data that is sent by the server.