Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

accent marks in Spanish--diacritics--not displaying correctly

more options

When I open documents I have created in Spanish, or Spanish language words that appear in largely English language documents, the diacritical marks (accepts, umlats, etc.) all appear with odd symbols, sometimes two or three, like capital letters, etc. instead of the accent mark in a word, such as Simón Bolívar.

When I open documents I have created in Spanish, or Spanish language words that appear in largely English language documents, the diacritical marks (accepts, umlats, etc.) all appear with odd symbols, sometimes two or three, like capital letters, etc. instead of the accent mark in a word, such as Simón Bolívar.

All Replies (6)

more options

How does that relate to Firefox? "Documents" are usually created in a word processing program which handles diacritical marks and some punctuation marks differently than a web browser does. Firefox doesn't display files created in word processing programs directly, it would use a "plugin".

more options

With which encoding as those pages saved and with which encoding are you opening them?

Sounds that they were saved as Unicode and opened as a Western encoding.

more options

Well, I created the doc in a word authoring program (MS Expression) and opened it in Firefox. However, I think the second person to answer this query nailed it. It has to do with character encoding. thanks for answer anyhow. larry clayton

more options

Right after I wrote the query I started experimenting with different character encoding. I can get the diacritics to appear normally by selecting unicode. I think Firefox was defaulting to Western. Is there a way to make one a default selection BTW? Other than simply selecting it from the drop down menu?

more options

You can try to place an UTF-8 Byte Order Mark () at the start on the file.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_Order_Mark

more options

Is that like an http syntax?