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LOCATION: Web Developers » Developing Tips » Dreamweaver Tips

Using Dreamweaver for Non-English Sites

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  1. Recommended Versions
  2. Dreamweaver and Accents (Latin-1)
  3. Configure Dreamweaver for Other Scripts
  4. Option 1: Working with Importing Encoded Text
  5. Option 2: Type Encoded Text

Recommended Versions

Windows

Most recent versions of Dreamweaver will create international pages effectively.

Macintosh

Dreamweaver MX 2004 and later allow users to use most of the keyboards. Dreamweaver MX supports text import, but not all keyboards.

Dreamweaver and Accents

Inserting

You can insert special characters into Dreamweaver by typing them in directly or by going to Insert then Special Characters.

Encoding and Accents

In the default set-up, Dreamweaver pages are encoded as Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1). When you type an accented letter such as ñ, Dreamweaver converts it to the appropriate entity code (e.g. ñ)

However, if your page is set up for some other encoding system such as Unicode and you type directly into Dreamweaver, the conversion from typed character to entity code will be disabled. If you need your pages to be in Unicode, but wish to use entity codes, they need to be entered manually in the code pane.

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Configuring Dreamweaver

Change Default Encoding

The default encoding for HTML documents created in U.S. Dreamweaver is Latin-1. To change the default encoding for new HTML documents to something else such as Unicode, do the following.

  1. Open Dreamweaver, then under the Edit menu, choose Preferences (Dreamweaver » Preferences in OS X ) to open the Preferences window.
  2. In the Category menu to the left, select New Document. Select an item from the Default Encoding drop-down menu such as "Unicode" then click OK.
    Note: In Dreamweaver MX 2004, Unicode is "UTF-8 (Unicode)"; in Dreamweaver 8 it's "Unicode 4.0 UTF-8."

    screen capture new docs

Match Fonts with Scripts

Developers need a recent version of Dreamweaver and the relevant fonts installed. You should also configure Dreamweaver to work with a non-English HTML file.

  1. Open Dreamweaver, then under the Edit menu, choose Preferences (Dreamweaver » Preferences in OS X) to open the Preferences window.
  2. In the Category menu to the left, select Fonts or Fonts/Encoding.
    Dreamweaver Screencapture
    Fonts Preferences from Dreamweaver
  3. In the Font Settings menu to the right, choose an appropriate script (e.g. "Cyrillic"). Be careful not to choose Default Encoding .
    Note: Although not all scripts are listed, Dreamweaver can actually import encoded text for other scripts.
  4. Select an appropriate font which matches that script from the Proportional Font, Fixed and HTML Inspector dropdown menus. Click OK to shut the window.
  5. Open a document which is encoded in a non-English script. The characters should be in that script, even in the HTML Source window.
  6. For some scripts, you can switch keyboards and type directly in that language.

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Option 1: Import and Format Encoded Text

One way to work with Dreamweaver is to open an encoded HTML file and then add the formatting or style tags as needed.

Suggested Text Editors

These text editors allow you to easily type encoded text then export them as properly encoded HTML or text files.

  1. Microsoft Word - The simplest option is to copy and paste the text from Word (Word 2004 for Macintosh) into another text editor such as Notepad (Windows) or Text Edit (Apple). See details below for saving the files.
  2. Notepad (free with Windows)
    1. When you save a .txt file, you switch the encoding from ANSI to UTF-8.
    2. You can cut and paste items into Dreamweaver or other HTML editor (Dreamweaver file must be set to utf-8 Unicode encoding).
  3. Apple TextEdit (free with OS X)
    1. Set up TextEdit to save as an encoded text (.txt) file by going to Preferences and selecting the Plain Text option then select an appropriate Encoding.
    2. You can cut and paste items into Dreamweaver or other HTML editor (Dreamweaver file must be set to utf-8 Unicode encoding)
  4. UniType GlobalWriter (Windows) - To export an encoded HTML file, go to File then Save As. Select the HTML file type. The next window will ask you to choose an encoding before saving. If in doubt, choose Unicode.
  5. StarOffice (Windows/Linux)
    1. To save StarOffice documents as encoded documents, go to File, then Save As. Select the Text Encoded format. In the next window, select UTF-8 encoding.
    2. You can cut and paste items into Dreamweaver or other HTML editor (Dreamweaver file must be set to utf-8 Unicode encoding)
  6. Other text editors designed for foreign language text editing may be able to export encoded text or HTML files.

NOTE: Because of Microsoft HTML formatting issues, export from Microsoft Word is not recommended.

If you use this option, try to use only minimal formatting in the text editor then add formatting within Dreamweaver.

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Option 2: Type Directly into Dreamweaver

For some major scripts, you can type directly into Dreamweaver by switching your keyboards. Keyboards for any scripts you wish to use must first be installed and activated. See the Keyboards section for more details on how to activate keyboards. Supported keyboards include the Windows U.S. International Keyboard and the OS X Extended keyboard codes.

Note: If switching keyboards does not work, then make sure the encoding meta tag is set differently from Latin 1.

Potential Pitfalls

  1. Make sure file declares the encoding within the HTML HEAD tag; otherwise the keyboard may not work.The Unicode declaration is given below; see the Declare Encoding page for more examples.

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

  2. Avoid specifying specific fonts for a script as some alternative browsers and platforms may not be able to read the page (the encoding should be enough to trigger the font changes). If specific fonts must be specified, then make sure both Window and Macintosh equivalents are specified.
  3. When opening HTML files exported from a text editor, inspect the code to be sure it does not include vendor-specific tags which may not work on all browsers.
  4. For U.S. audiences, it is best to provide instructions to users on how to configure their browsers.
  5. For languages whose encoding systems are not widely supported by browsers, the text editor and Dreamweaver can still be used to develop the web page, but you will need to take extra steps to provide information on recommended browsers and fonts.
  6. Unfortunately, some scripts may be so undersupported that there may not be a viable encoding system or text editor available. In these cases another option should be used.

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©Penn State University, 2000-2009.
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: Wednesday, 01-Aug-2007 14:34:34 EDT