The Lensmaster Lounge

Scholara · 05/03/2008 1:25 am

I have checked the soruce code nd found our charset is iso-8859-1 = western european or ascii?

As an instructional example I tried to insert

&#x5b57 a chinese unihan code

I dont want to do long passages in chinese just a few words amidst an english text

what I was trying to do was a few examples to illustrate instructions on the different ways to insert special characters without having to waste time converting the characters to jpgs or gifs

why doesnst a basic bit of coding like &3xn or &#n work

If I cant insert unihan can i at least insert western european chars from ascii that are not on the keyboard using entity names?

I want to doemnstrate how scholars can add macrons and diacritics or greek characters or maths and IPA symbols!

finally why dont we use utf-8 as a charset ?

surely we should be fully unicode compliant ? why not?

The lens is www.squidoo.com/signage

Ideas ? Explanations? Code examples?

N376 · 05/03/2008 5:20 am

Scholara wrote:
surely we should be fully unicode compliant ? why not?

Not fully.

I got away with some maths symbols at www.squidoo.com/advancedhtml

If you're having trouble trying to get specific HTML entities to work drop Squidoo HQ a note and let Gil know what's not working for you.

Jimmie · 05/03/2008 2:16 pm

I feel your pain, Scholara. I had to work really hard to get a few characters on these 3 Chinese holiday lenses:

www.squidoo.com/dragonboatfestivalunitstudy
www.squidoo.com/chinesenewyearunitstudy
www.squidoo.com/midautumnfestivalunitstudy

My characters in HTML (I guess it's HTML; I'm clueless) have &#, a string of numbers, and a semicolon (no spaces) just like you have in your post:
屈 is this &#two three six two four ; (writing it out so it won't turn into the character)

I don't know what this is, I just got it to work in a very, very round about and inefficient way. I persisted in trying different things until I got it to work. I KNOW there is a better way, but I can't figure it out. I am not a native Chinese speaker or typer! :-) So here's what I did.

I typed the characters I wanted in my word processor (which has special software for allowing that). Then a cut and pasted them into a blog post. Then I viewed the page source of the blog post and identified what the HTML code (?) is for each character. Then I copied and pasted THAT into my lens.

Whew.... it was such a pain. But there are the lovely characters! And it was worth it to me.

I don't know if that will help you at all. From looking at your lens, you have much more understanding of this than I. But somehow I got it to work.

I know that there must be other lensmasters (besides you and me) who desire to use special characters and struggle with how to do it.

Jimmie

Last edited by Jimmie (05/03/2008 2:24 pm)

Jimmie · 05/03/2008 2:28 pm

I found this lens linked on YOUR lens in the Explore Related Lenses section:

http://www.squidoo.com/foreigncharacters

I'm still lost. But maybe it will help you.

Here's a great link from the lens above:
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/inte … index.html

I think that from studying this page, I can figure it out eventually.

Last edited by Jimmie (05/03/2008 2:32 pm)

Scholara · 05/03/2008 5:44 pm

Dear Jimmie and Glen thanks for responding. I have goen back and renetering the html code in both the dialog box and the source code but its still not showing

in the source code where i typed &3 ampersand and hash its adding &#; which I didnt type!

i removed that from the source code but it just that back again

why is the server treating the hexadecimal code like this?

anyone know?

cross fingers and see what happens next!

adez7 · 05/05/2008 5:52 am

Welcome aboard Squidoo, We're glad that you have found us. You will find that we are a very hospitable and friendly group of folks. We love all our newbees, and we will help you out in any way we can.

So for starters, here are some great resources to get you going with that first lens, and also help you out with the html and more advanced aspects of lens building. Be sure to book mark this post so that you can find these great resources when ever you need them. I know it looks like a lot, just take your time and go through them one by one, and you will see it is as easy as 1, 2, 3.

The first thing, and in my opinion, one of the most important things for you to do is to go into your dash board, look for the "My Profile" at the top, click on it, and add your Bio and upload an avatar or picture. This will appear on all of your lenses and add some credibility and personality to your collection of lenses. To back this up I submit the following post you might want to take time to read in full!

http://www.squidu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=13871

MeganCasey wrote:
1. The new lensmaster bio bar is getting a lot more clicks than before. A lot. Which means more people are clicking to see your other pages and your profile. That's a good thing. So when you have time, try updating your profiles to add a welcome note or a little intro to your body of work, and feel free to post links to, say, your favorite top 10 lenses right in there.

poddys · 05/05/2008 8:35 am

Another posibility might be to generate an image with the Chinese characters / words, and to insert that into the module of the lens. Hopefully that might be a work around.

Scholara · 05/07/2008 11:54 pm

Thanks to the few people who had sensible ideas.

At this stage it looks like sadly I am going to have to go back and generate a png in Inkscape and then change that to a jpg to insert in the module! GRRR!

Several of you think the problem is caused by iframes no longer being supported but according to my html reference book Castro 5th edition Ch. 20 p.340 this shouldnt effect inserting special characters.

Inserting a special character is not the same as inserting a graphic!

VERY different (x)html code!

All I should have to do regardless of whether or not the page uses utf-8 or not is use either an entity name or decimal coding three digits or four digits and hexadecimal and type this bit of code :

& # x 5b57;

(without the spaces) entered in the source code which I did should give me the chinese character ZI!

Something that really frightens me and demonstrates why we need to be UNICODE compliant and why I need to finish revising my LENS is that someone on the support / feedback team actually described the ascii subset as "English characters" NOT Roman or Western European but ENGLISH.

Watch html coders ROTFL? "English characters".

Please do not ask me why this is cruelly ironically bemusing!

It's one of those you either know or you dont technical things!

Even ASCII is not just used for English!

Hello its the World Wide Web!!!

I see I am now going to have to add an explanation on the difference between ASCII Special Characters and UNICODE to the lens!

Along with a lens maybe explaining what Unihan is?

Exits quietly sobbing ... actually thats the weepy tear duct ... I gotta find what my new allergy is!

&#X5B57; should show as ZI !

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#1 05/03/2008 1:25 am

inserting special characters HOW???

#2 05/03/2008 5:20 am

Re: inserting special characters HOW???

Scholara wrote:

#3 05/03/2008 2:16 pm

Re: inserting special characters HOW???

#4 05/03/2008 2:28 pm

Re: inserting special characters HOW???

#5 05/03/2008 5:44 pm

Re: inserting special characters HOW???

#6 05/05/2008 5:52 am

Re: inserting special characters HOW???

MeganCasey wrote:

#7 05/05/2008 8:35 am

Re: inserting special characters HOW???

#8 05/07/2008 11:54 pm

Re: inserting special characters HOW???

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