How To Configure Your Browser For Unicode

Note: Things have changed a lot since this page was introduced, and to the better.

Today you can expect any web page to declare properly what encoding should be used, and all modern browsers honour this. Therefore normally no action needs to be taken at all, and you will still see APL characters just fine.

When you use a Browser to send something to a server, presumably all Browsers in the Western world use "Western something" as the default encoding. To take advantage of Unicode and enable others to see any APL code you might embed in your posting, you must configure your Browser correctly, otherwise it won't work.

For how to configure e-mail clients and news reader see ConfiguringMailAndNewsReaders.

To enforce your Browser to display a particular site or a particular part of a site in a particular font, see ConfigureYourBrowserForAPL

For a general article about Unicode and encoding see UnicodeForAplers.

Google Chrome

Screenshots are taken from version 1.0

Step 1

On the "Tools" menu, select "Options":

GC_01.png

Step 2

On the "Minor Tweaks" tab, click "Change font and language settings":

GC_02.png

Step 3

On the "Fonts and Languages" dialog, change the following:

  1. Set "Fixed-width Font" to "APL385 Unicode"
  2. Set "Default Encoding" to "Unicode (UTF-8)"

GC_03.png

Firefox

The screenshots are taken from version 3.0.5

Step 1

Choose the "Options" command from the "Tools" menu:

FF_01.gif

Note that the actual "Tools" on your machine might look differently due to the add-ons you have installed, if any.

Step 2

On the following dialog box select the "Content" tab:

FF_02.gif

Then select the "Advanced" button.

Step 3

On this dialog box:

FF_03.gif

make sure that you define "Unicode (UTF-8)" as the "Default Character Encoding".

To make any APL characters look nice, select an appropriate APL Unicode font as "Monospace" font.

You might also want to change the size parameter - the APL385 Unicode font, for example, does not like nice in all sizes available.

That's it, you are done.

Internet Explorer

Step 1

From the "View" menu, select the "Encoding" command and then from the sub-menu "Unicode (UTF-8)":

IE_01.gif

Step 2

To make any APL characters look nice, select an appropriate APL Unicode font. For this, select from the "Tools" menu the "Internet Options" command:

IE_02.gif

Step 3

On the dialog box select "Fonts":

IE_03.gif

Step 4

Make sure that you define an appropriate Unicode APL font as "Plain Text Font":

IE_04.gif

Unfortunately you cannot specify a size for any fonts in Internet Explorer.

Screenshots are taken from version 7.0

Mozilla

The screenshots are taken from version 1.7

Step 1

To specify the encoding, select the "View" menu the "Character Encoding" command:

MZ_03.gif

and then from the sub-menu "Unicode (UTF-8)":

MZ_04.gif

Step 2

To make APL chars looking good, select from the "Edit" menu the "Preferences" command:

MZ_01.gif

First select "Fonts" in the tree on the right of the dialog. Then specify an appropriate Unicode APL font as "Monospace" font:

MZ_02.gif

You might also want to change the size parameter - the APL385 Unicode font, for example, does not like nice in all sizes available.

That's it, you are done.

Opera

Step 1

Specify the proper encoding by selecting from the "View" menu the "Encoding" command and then from the sub-menu "Unicode > UTF-8"

OP_01.gif

Step 2

To specify an appropriate APL Unicode font, select from the "Tools" menu the "Preferences" command:

OP_02.gif

In the upcoming dialog, click on the button to the right of "Monospace font" ash shown here:

OP_03.gif

Now select an appropriate APL Unicode font as in this example:

OP_04.gif

The screenshots are taken from version 9.5

Safari

Step 1

From the "Edit" menu select the "Preferences" command:

SA_01.gif

Step 2

In this dialog you can specify both, the appropriate encoding "Unicode (UTF-8)" and appropriate APL Unicode font as "Fixed-width font":

SA_02.gif

Attention!

Note that Safari offers in the "View" menu an "Text Encoding" command. This command does not work anyway if no page is displayed, but even when it works, it changes the encoding only temporary and for the current page!

The screenshots are taken from version 3.1

CategoryUnicode

ConfigureYourBrowserForUnicode (last edited 2017-05-30 07:29:54 by KaiJaeger)