French/ English Bilingual Site

How do you get those French accent Marks?

[bumpaw]

I have a client that wants me to mirror his English site in French. Where does one start in trying to type code that will display the little accent marks? He will furnish the translation, but I will have to put it together.

[j4mes]

Things like é will do it, try searching for "HTML ASCII table" or something to that effect and you should find what you're looking for.

[Macguru]

I believe you could get better answers by informing us wich WYSIWYG software you use and wich default character encodings the site already uses.

[bumpaw]

For character encoding would "charset=iso-8859-1" be what you are referring to?

As far as editors I have HTMLKit, Dreamweaver, and Front Page. I probably do need to search more, but I've been behind dealing with a browser hijacker.

[jatar_k]

maybe this will help a bit
[w3.org...]

and this was actually an interesting read
[cs.tut.fi...]

[bumpaw]

Thanks jatar_k thats going to get me started fine. I'll be able to research from those two interesting links. I just needed a quick starting point. You guys are very helpful.:)

[Macguru]

If you already have charset=iso-8859-1 by Dreamweaver default on every pages, it will take care of *almost* everthing by just pasting the French text in pages in WYSIWYG window.

That could save you a lot of time...

[Staffa]

If your PC is an IBM compatible you can get all the characters when holding down ALT while typing on the numbers pad :

ALT+keypad numbers, ie

ALT 130 = é
ALT 133 = à
ALT 135 = ç

etc. I don't know if it's the same for a Mac computer.

[PCInk]

If you hold down alt+<numbers>, it will work on your computer, but other users (including Mac users, those with foreign lagnuages installed as default and many other possibilities) may see a different character.

This is why the w3c recommend the &aacute; format - this will transform into whatever character number for the system it is being used on.

[Leosghost]

just in case you hit the problem ..best to be forewarned ..French translations of almost anything take up more text space than English....so watch your layouts ...and of course make sure the police ( typeface ) you are using actually does have all these accents ..some of the more "graphical" ones don't ....

( as an editer Dw Mx does fine in French...although if you work in it or anything else with a spell checker enabled you need to remember to switch the language )

[Larryhat]

I do this the dumb simple way. I just browse up some obviously French page, then cut and paste accented letters, the letter c with the snoodle dangling off the bottom and anything like that, right into my HTML text.
One caution, there are two accents. One slants to the left, the other the opposite way.

I have a UFO related site. One time I wanted to spam my URL into a Russian UFO blog. Not knowing any Russian and completely baffled by their cryllic alphabet, I composed a 'message' of randomly chosen words, with my URL prominently placed and sent that in.
Amazingly, my message got posted. I sure wish I could understand the responses. I sent copies to friends (equally ignorant of Russian) and they thought it looked fine.

Best wishes. -LH

[encyclo]

As Macguru mentioned, if you are using ISO-8859-1, then you shouldn't need to use the character references such as &eacute; or &ccedil;. One minor problem is the joined oe, but you can use either &#339; or just don't worry about it and use the separate letters.

The biggest hassle I find is with quotes - you should really be replacing &quot; or " (used in English) with &laquo; at the beginning and &raquo; at the end. What's more, you need a non-breaking space between the quote marks and the quote itself, giving the rather heavy:

&laquo;&nbsp;Ceci est une citation&nbsp;&raquo;

My editor (Bluefish 0.13 on Linux) can do this on demand when you paste in French text with the correct French-style quotes.

Finally, check for other differences in spacing - theoretically, you need a non-breaking half-space before a question mark or an exclamation mark, but you can't do that on the web. You can either use a standard non-breaking space like this: &nbsp;? - or again, don't bother and don't have a space at all.

To enter the characters on your keyboard, you can try mapping your keyboard to the French Canadian layout, which is still qwerty but with accented letters available on minor keys - much better than the awful French-France azerty layout which will turn anyone used to qwerty layouts into a quivering wreck, and leave your page full of gibberish.

[Staffa]

Thanks PCInk for pointing that out.
I had a good day today, I learned something new ;o)

[Leosghost]

much better than the awful French-France azerty layout which will turn anyone used to qwerty layouts into a quivering wreck, and leave your page full of gibberish.

Not full of gibberish ..but it does mean that I have to re-edit my posts here at least 6 times before they have only some spelling mistakes ....the worst thing is typing fast and thinking in both languages ..somewhat akin to mentally tying your own shoelaces together ...
Lots of wine helps to release the stress caused ;)

[bumpaw]

Man this thing is going to go smoothly. The client had the site translated, and whoever he used must have known what he was doing. It's just cut and paste with HomeSite and it works. There are no universal references either. Not one &agrave; The little squiggles are in the code and displayed in the browser. The only thing that didn't make sense to me was this line:

<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1400" name=GENERATOR>

[encyclo]

<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2800.1400" name=GENERATOR>

It's just an identifier for the generating program of the HTML. Just delete it - it's not needed.