International character support in Safari and Mail
Sep 17, '04 10:05:00AM
Contributed by: Anonymous
For the longest time I had trouble figuring out how to get the Safari default text encodings to work well with my Hungarian characters. I was having the following problems:
- Forms that I submitted had "?" marks where there were supposed to be special Hungarian characters
- Mail that I sent with these characters arrived jumbled up for Outlook Express users, Yahoo Mail users, etc.
So I finally found the solution; this will work for all supported languages and text encodings. First go to Mac OS X's Preferences, and select the International Pane. Under Language, add the appropriate one, and drag it to the top (so that it is first). Under Formats, select the appropriate region, and under the Input Menu, add the appropriate language. We're done with the easy part.
At this point, some languages should already work fine. Others (like Hungarian) need a little more work. Open up Terminal (in Applications -> Utilities), and type:
sudo defaults write com.apple.mail WebKitDefaultTextEncoding ISO-8859-2
Replace ISO-8859-2 with the appropriate encoding needed for your language. Then type:
sudo defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDefaultTextEncoding ISO-8859-2
And again, substitute the correct encoding. Now log out and log back in. Both Safari and Mail should now work perfectly. Good luck!
[robg adds: I don't think that the sudo should be required, as this is simply changing a preference in the user's domain, and make sure neither app is running when you execute those commands. I have not tested this hint.]
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