Diacritical marks lost on the net. How retain or recover?
Ben Waggoner
bmw at UCLINK2.BERKELEY.EDU
Mon Mar 18 23:22:03 CST 1996
On Mon, 18 Mar 1996, HAROLD WM KERSTER wrote:
> A colleague wants to publish a biblio on the net. Many languages
> occur in the citations, so a few accents grave, etc. are present. Transmission
> via the internet strips off the marks. Can anyone suggest how to retain
> the marks or a way to restore them after transmission?
> If you are interested in this problem, let me know and I'll pass to
> you any answers that seem workable.
It depends on which of the several electronic media within the Internet
your colleague wants to use. If the biblio is to appear on the World Wide
Web -- which may be best; it's certainly the most accessible -- it's easy
to add diacritical marks to an HTML file. You have to replace the marked
letters with short codes, which all begin with an ampersand and end with a
semicolon. O with an umlaut, for instance, is ö . Capital N with a
tilde is Ñ . Lower-case a with an accent grave is à So in an
HTML file, to be viewed using Web browsers such as Netscape, you'd render
the first line of the "Ode to Joy" as
Freude, schöner götterfunken
and anyone viewing the page would see "Freude, schoner gotterfunken" with
umlauts over the o's.
Most of the codes are easy to figure out; the format is & [letter]
[abbreviated name of diacritical mark] ; You can find a full list of codes
in any standard reference book on HTML.
As for other means of Internet transmission: I don't know how gopher would
handle this (maybe someone else does?), and I presume your colleague won't
be posting the whole thing on any Usenet newsgroups or e-mail lists, which
is a good way to annoy a lot of people very quickly. That leaves anonymous
ftp. Here you could always just make the bibliography available as, say, a
Microsoft Word file, with everything formatted and all diacritical marks in
place. Users will have to download the entire file to read it, but if
they have Microsoft Word, they'll have the formatted file with diacritical
marks. And if they don't, it's their problem. B) I hope this helps.
Ben Waggoner
Department of Integrative Biology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720 USA
bmw at uclink2.berkeley.edu
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his
conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?"
Henry David Thoreau. "Civil Disobedience"
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