Help with languages in FP 2000

[7thDsites]

Hi All,

First I would like to say that I've been a huge fan of FP2000 for years, I gave 2006 a try and well went back to 2000... EvrSoft rocks!

Anyway, I recently had some docs translated into a few languages and I'm now trying to copy and paste the translations into my templates in FirstPage with no luck - specifically I have a word doc with the Chinese translation and when I paste the paragraphs into FP it converts the Chinese characters into question marks.

Can someone please, please tell me how I can fix this?

Best,
john

[Cary]

First Page supports several encodings, but I don't know if any will allow you to do what you're trying.

One solution is to load your html pages into Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/). After a page is loaded, go to the Format menu and make sure "UTF-8 without BOM" is selected. Insert the Chinese text, or whatever, and then save your html file. You probably won't want to overwrite the original html as First Page can't correctly load utf-8 encoded files with Chinese and such.

I would recommend against using the regular Notepad to do this as it only saves utf-8 encoded pages with the BOM. (Well, at least with the Windows 2000 version.)

Notepad2 (http://www.flos-freeware.ch/) is an alternate editor you could use. After you load an html page select "File" > "Encoding" > "UTF-8". Don't use "UTF-8 with Signature" because it includes the BOM.

[7thDsites]

Thanks Cary - I did as you suggested and in the notepad++ it looks as it should but the html version just shows some kind of scribble scrabble mess that's certainly not Chinese... any ideas?

[Cary]

Thanks Cary - I did as you suggested and in the notepad++ it looks as it should but the html version just shows some kind of scribble scrabble mess that's certainly not Chinese... any ideas?

I assume you mean the scribble scrabble appeared in the browser? If not, please let me know. I forgot that you need to tell the browser what encoding the page is using. Use Notepad++ to add the following meta tag to the head of the html. If there is already a meta tag defining the character set, you can either change it to match the following or delete it.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

Make sure to reset the encoding of the page to UTF-8 after loading just as you did before. A side effect of not including BOM information is neither Notepad2 nor Notepad++ can tell what they're loading, so they both default to ANSI encoding when you reload the page.

[7thDsites]

That fixed it - thanks much!! Really appreciate it!