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Suppose a web browser isn't properly displaying the text of a web page.
Remember that the key to displaying foreign text properly is: 0. having the browser set to the right Default Character Set or Encoding
1. having the right fonts installed on your computer
2. having the browser set to the right Character Set or Encoding
3. having the browser set to the right Default Font for that Character Set or Encoding

If you aren't familiar with your browser's settings, or with the procedures necessary to change those settings, then you might first want to use the following web pages to find out if your browser is able to automatically display the major Latin, Cyrillic and Greek writing systems.

.TITUS: ISO-8859 and its representation in the WWW
.ISO 8859 Alphabet Soup @ czyborra.com
.The Cyrillic Charset Soup @ czyborra.com



Is your browser set to the right Encoding or to the right Character Set? Try this first: change the browser's current Encoding/Character Set
(This tells your browser which Encoding/Character Set the web page supposedly has been written in.)

Have you set  the right Default Font for that Encoding/Character Set?

Then try this:  change the browser's Default Font for that Encoding/Character Set.
(This tells your browser which font to use for that Encoding/Character Set.)

Do you even have the right fonts installed on your computer?

Download and install the right font.
Once you have installed new fonts, go back and try again the first two things above.

On older versions of Windows (pre Windows-98) and in older browser versions, you may have to exit your browser completely and restart it in order for it to have access to the new fonts.  You may even have to restart your computer entirely to make the new fonts accessible to the browser.

Note: Some web pages ask you to keep your browser on the Western (or Western European or Latin-1) Encoding setting, and then they provide you with a special font which assigns characters from their own alphabet (or syllabary or other writing system).   You might have to set that special font as the default font for the Western Encoding.  This usually happens with languages or writing systems that are not specifically supported by both Netscape and Internet Explorer.  The Unicode encoding standard does support many of these languages (and Netscape and Internet Explorer do support Unicode), but Unicode fonts weren't readily, or cheaply, available at the time most of those sites were created, and they still aren't available or easily employable for many languages, and that's why they continue to use their own encoding set-ups.

What kind of character is the language written in?  Just about all the languages of Europe and the former Soviet Union use the Latin, Cyrillic or Greek alphabets. On most browsers you don't choose an alphabet to display, but rather an encoding standard or character set - which may or may not correspond to the individual alphabet or writing system of a specific language. For example, most of the languages of Europe are represented by encoding standards known by the following names: Western, Western European, Central European, Cyrillic, Baltic, and Greek.  Almost all web browsers - especially the latest versions - can prooperly implement those encoding standards without having to install new fonts or software.  But in order to properly view pages written for languages that use other alphabets, or writing systems, or Character Sets or Encodings, you will definitely have to have access to additional fonts, which usually means having to download them through the net.  Those fonts may actually be available through the web page you're trying to view. You should look for a link. If there's no link, then you'll have to look in one of the internet sites that specialize in foreign language fonts.  Or you may have to look for a web site that specializes in fonts for the particular language you're interested in.  If the web page you're trying to look at doesn't provide viewing instructions, the chances are that any font will work which matches the standard encoding for the language in question. So the problem would then be to find out the standard encoding and a compatible font.


 
UNICODE

Ultimately -- that is, in the end, in the near future, hopefully -- these technical issues will disappear with the universal implementation of a Unicode-like encoding standard.  If all the web pages, all the word-processing programs, all the browsers, and all the fonts in the world were fully compliant with an encoding standard such as Unicode,  nearly all the written characters ever used (that is, nearly all languages and writing systems, past and present) would be displayable even on a single page without any special effort by the person reading it.

If it were certain that every person reading this page right now were using a Unicode capable browser and fully compliant Unicode fonts, this page would've been encoded in Unicode, and no-one would have noticed or known the difference.  But to ensure maximal readability, things being as they are, this page had to be written using the default encoding most English language browsers use. (Actually, this page is now encoded in Unicode, for the sake of web-site consistency. But, since this page is written in English, and with no foreign characters, it will display almost identically as it would without Unicode -- the difference being determined mostly by your default browser settings, and also, for some reason, on the difference in the way your browser may display even the same font when using different encodings.)

The fact is, that the latest Netscape and Internet Explorer browser versions ARE already able to read Unicode encoded pages correctly, but they do not come with the fonts needed to display correctly, and Netscape and Microsoft don't tell you where or how to obtain them, or how to find out if you already have Unicode fonts on your computer.  Yet, there ARE fonts easily available even on the internet. And for free! Or nearly for free! Below, you can find links to these Unicode fonts, as well as links to more information about Unicode.

UNICODE

To view any of the links below, you need to have a Unicode font.
One, called Code2000, is available at the first link below.

About UNICODE:
. Unicode Support in Your Browser New Address.
. Unicode and multilingual support in Web browsers and HTML
. Unicode and multilingual support in Web browsers and HTML  New Address.
. Setting up Windows Internet Explorer 5.5 for Multilingual and Unicode Support
. Setting up Windows Internet Explorer 5.5 for Multilingual and Unicode Support New Address.
. Unicode's characters
. Fonts for the Unicode Character Set
. Unicode test page
. Roadmap to Unicode
. Roadmap to Plane 0 (BMP) of ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode  old name of page above

Unicode repertoires by code-block:
. TITUS Is Testing Unicode Scriptmanagement
. Unicode test files

Unicode repertoires by language, language group, or script group:
. Unicode and multilingual support in Web browsers and HTML
. Unicode and multilingual support in Web browsers and HTML New Address.
. Liste des noms des caractères de l'ISO 10646-1 (French)
. Liste des noms des caractères de l'ISO 10646-1 (French) New address.
. TITUS Is Testing Unicode Scriptmanagement

Unicode samplers: pages displaying a mix of characters from different writing systems:
. A Unicode Test Page this page now requires a Numeric Character Reference (NCR) capable browser.
. Script sampler
. Script Links and Test Pages New Address.
. UTF-8 Test Page
. UTF-8 Test1
. UTF-8 Sampler
. Tenth International Unicode Conference - Languages
. Tenth International Unicode Conference - Unicode UTF-8
. Tenth International Unicode Conference - Unicode NCRs
. Decimal addresses for Phonetic Symbols in Unicode
. UTF-8 test New.

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