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International character support in Safari and Mail
Authored by: fds on Sep 17, '04 11:18:44AM

As for Safari:

There isn't a problem as long as the web site in question is properly made and specifies the character encoding either in the HTTP headers or inside HTML meta headers.

The default encoding setting only comes into play if the site's author neglected to correctly specify the encoding. Instead of going to the Terminal, it can easily be configured in Safari's Preferences on the Appearance tab.

No setting outside Safari needs to be changed.


As for Mail:

Mail automatically tries to determine the ideal character encoding which is sufficient to represent the characters you are trying to send. This automatic method does seem to be influenced by the list of languages you added to System Preferences - International - Languages.

For example staying with this hint's Hungarian, if only U.S. English is added as a language, Mail will send Hungarian messages encoded as utf-8. If "Magyar" is added to the list of languages, Mail will prefer iso-8859-2 and windows-1250 over utf-8 if possible. The order of the list of languages doesn't matter and you can safely leave U.S. English on top.

Note that in all cases, including utf-8, Mail properly encodes everything and if it doesn't show up correctly on the other side, the bug isn't in Mail.
Outlook Express on Windows in earlier versions had some trouble handling utf-8 messages. Recent versions seem to be fine, and the "big" Outlook wasn't affected.


In summary I find this hint somewhat misleading in suggesting that special settings are necessary for the proper sending of national characters.



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International character support in Safari and Mail
Authored by: dovale on Sep 23, '04 08:02:27AM

Sometime I'm using Safari to access Hebrew language sites. I've set the default language encoding in Safari to Hebrew (Windows). The 'home' page of every Hebrew language site is displayed correctly, but when I try to open a link in a new Tab I get jigibrish. In order to correct it, I have to go to View > Text Encoding > Hebrew (Windows). It's all quite tiresome.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Benny Brunner



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