Skip Header
Teaching and Learning with Technology
Computing With Accents and Foreign Scripts
TLT Home : TLT Suggestions Skip Menu
LOCATION: Developing Web Sites » Non-Roman Text for ANGEL

ANGEL - Typing Non-Roman Text in
Firefox/Mozilla

This page describes a technique for entering non-Roman text in Web-based course tools such as ANGEL, Course Talk and other similar tools. The text can be entered via Firefox, Netscape 7 or Mozilla only. Once entered, the text is viewable on other browsers (except for Netscape 4.7).

Input Text

These instructions only work in Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape 7/8.

  1. To input the text, open Firefox, Mozilla or Netscape 7/8 go to the course tool in which you wish to input text. Ideally, you should be at a form where text input is required.
  2. Switch your keyboard from English to a foreign language keyboard. Directions  for switching keyboards on Windows and Macintosh are available in the "Platforms" section of this  Web page.
  3. Begin typing the non-Roman text.
  4. When finished, you can switch your keyboard back to English. You can switch between keyboards as often as needed.

What Happened

When you typed the text on the keyboard, the browser converted the input into numeric Unicode escape codes. If you go back to edit the text, you will see these codes. 

You should test this procedure in each part of a tool to make sure it is working correctly before using the materials with students.

View Text

Students can view non-Roman text on most modern browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer - Windows, Safari, Opera). They will not be able to see the text in Netscape 4.7 or Internet Explorer for Mac.

Edit Text

Because the browser converted the text to the Unicode escape characters (e.g. Д for Cyrillic Д), the text can be difficult to edit within the Web-based tool. However, the text can be reedited if the codes are pasted into Mozilla Composer in the HTML Source window. In Composer, the codes will be converted back into editable non-Roman characters.

Top of Page

©Penn State University, 2000-2007.
This Web page maintained by Teaching and Learning with Technology, a unit of Information Technology Services. For questions or comments on this Web page, please contact Elizabeth J. Pyatt (ejp10@psu.edu).
Unicode character names and hexadecimal entity codes are taken from the public Unicode Character Charts.
Last Modified: Tuesday, 06-Mar-2007 12:16:46 EST