I'm surveying to see if special characters will display for most people on SciForums. This is something I'd like to know when posting content from different languages that don't use the plain Roman alphabet.

Below are items that contain certain special characters. First, it will appear in text. Then there will be an embedded picture showing all the characters properly displayed. Font, size, and other variables don't matter here. Tell me which ones display properly. If some of them don't, please explain the specific display problems, like if there are only squares, or whatever.

Because of the limit on the number of pictures I'm allowed in my post, I'll put two in this post, and the other two in the following one.


Item one:

Hwæt! We Gār-Dena in geār-dagum,
þēod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaðena þrēatum,
monegum mǣgðum meodo-setla oftēah.



Item two:

僕は英語とドイツ語話します。

Item three:

Nǚ rén bú shì dà má.



Item four:

aɪ keɪm əz aɪs aɪ keɪm əz ə hoɹ
aɪ keɪm əz ədˈvaɪs ðət keɪm tu ʃoɹt
aɪ keɪm əz ɡoɫd aɪ keɪm əz kɹæp
aɪ keɪm klin ənd aɪ keɪm əz ə ɹæt

111

Goodie.

No.

Be more specific.

Item two is just a series of question marks, below that is just an image place holder.

You mean there's no image for item two? Try a direct link: http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y65...ulf/Bokuwa.png

Here's another example. Since this text reads right to left, but I can't make it appear properly aligned, this aspect won't count.

Item five:

جورج ووكر بوش أو جورج و. بوش (بالإنجليزية: George Walker Bush)
هو الرئيس الحالي والثالث والأربعون للولايات المتّحدة الأمريكيّة.
كان حاكما لولاية تكساس قبل توليه رئاسة الدولة. ولد في 6 تموز، 1946
وتسلّم الحكم في 20 كانون الثاني 2001 بعد إنتخابات متقاربة النتائج مع آل غور.
في عام 2004 أعيد انتخابة للمرة الثانية لمدّة أربع سنوات، تنتهي فترة حكمه في
20 كانون الثاني 2009.

إنتخابات متقاربة الن

Where'd that bit of Arabic come from?

It shows for me.

You will find that these language sets will show or not mostly depending on the computer OS being used to view the thread. Support for different text encoding schemes is mostly OS dependant; the classic popular encoding being ASCII, a limited method that was designed to handle English, and did so quite well.

However, other languages exist, as well as other non-language characters not a part of the ASCII encoding. Today there are different variations of the UTF standard, most of which are supported by cyrrent Linux versions, Windows XP, and OS X, the three most common Operating Systems.

The most common ecoding method today is UTF-8
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

They all display correctly for me. However, I have trouble posting the full character set on OS/X using Safari. I just downloaded Firefox, let's see if it does any better:

Hwæt! We Gār-Dena in geār-dagum,

僕は英語とドイツ語話します。

جورج ووكر بوش أو جورج و. بوش (بالإنجليزي

Hmmm. They display okay. But the only way I can get them is to copy from someone else's post. The "insert special character" command in Safari is missing in Firefox.

That's odd that it doesn't work.

I didn't know you used OS X.

Finding a way to insert special characters is always a pain for me. I have keyboard layouts for different languages in the language toolbar on my taskbar (I use XP). English US is the default. I use either English International or "Spanish (Traditional Sort)" to type letters with diacritics and other characters used in English, Spanish, and French. I use German or English International for ess-zet. And finally, I have the keyboards for Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. I know for a fact that OS X has this same capability; last summer when I was in an Apple store in Portland, I added the Chinese keyboard on a Mac so I could look something up on the Chinese Wikipedia. Have you tried this, and does it work?

http://www.keystonemac.com/characterPalette.html

Last week most of those characters would not have showed because I just reinstalled my OS and I haven't had the chance yet to clean out my fonts — it's not just the OS; those fonts must be installed. Long endless font menus displaying font sets I never use is a bit patronizing.

Couldn't you go to System Preferences>International>Input Menu and select the keyboards? If you check the show input menu in menu bar option, can't you select different input options? (I haven't tried this in a browser so I don't know if it works)

item 2 displays as a string of question marks.
below that appears to be japanese or korean.

From your bit of arabic.

That's what I get. I assume there's a way to install those fonts?