Character translation on export (Offline Explorer Pro)

Paul Christie
03/29/2005 02:38 am
I have been having trouble with the display of certain characters in various browsers when I export a site from OE Pro. The characters include the common curly single and double quotation marks (incl. apostrophe), the en-dash and em-dash, and a few others.

Our web site makes extensive use of these characters. In OE Pro`s internal browser they seem to display fine, but when I export a copy of the site and view in IE or Firefox, the characters appears as a€™ (for the apostrophe), or a€“ (for the n-dash).

I have tried using hyphen`s or straight quotes, which translate OK, but is typographically not correct.

I thought it might be because we were using the common character codes (in the range &#129 to &#159) which are invalid characters in HTML - so I started using the supported ones such as:
&#8216 - opening single quote
&#8217 - closing single quote
&#8220 - opening double quote
&#8212 - em dash
&#8211 en dash

However, these still do not translate after exporting - but they appear fine within OE Pro`s browser.

Any help would be appreciated.

Paul
Oleg Chernavin
03/29/2005 06:41 am
Paul,

This is a known issue of MS IE which cannot automatically detect the correct page encoding when it loads the page from disk. You can either right-click the page in the browser and choose Encoding > Unicode (UTF-8) or try to export the site with the newer version of Offline Explorer:

http://www.metaproducts.com/download/betas/oep1978.zip

It should add the correct UTF-8 encoding line to the exported HTML pages.

Best regards,
Oleg Chernavin
MP Staff
Paul Christie
03/29/2005 09:09 pm
Hi Oleg,

Thanks very much. I have tried both suggestions and it`s taken care of the problem.

Regards,
Paul
Oleg Chernavin
03/30/2005 03:13 am
Great!

Oleg.