Configuring Netscape 4.7 (Deprecated)

Upgrade Recommendation : Although Netscape 4.7 can process some scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian, it lacks utilities for many other scripts. For these additional scripts Mozilla, Safari, Opera 7, or Internet Explorer for Windows are recommended.

Basic Instructions

1. Under the Edit menu, select Preferences.
2. You should see a window with a list of options on the left. Under the Appearances options, choose Fonts.
3. Determine which encoding and fonts are needed for your script from the individual By Language pages. In general, you have more choices in Netscape 6 and Mozilla than for Netscape 4.7.
4. See if your script is available in the drop-down menu.
   If your script is not listed, switch to Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Windows Internet Explorer or Safari (Mac) .
   Otherwise, determine which encoding and fonts are needed for your script from the individual By Language pages.

   NETSCAPE 4.7 FONT PREFERENCES
   

    

5. From the For the Encoding dropdown list, change Western to an appropriate script (e.g. Chinese Simplified). In some cases, there may be more options on Netscape 6 or Mozilla.
6. Select an appropriate Variable Width font and an appropriate Fixed Width font from the dropdown lists. A monospaced font is one in which all the characters take up the same amount of space and is associated with older computer terminals. Both fonts can be the same if necessary.

   This is fixed-width type

7. Click OK to close the window.
   

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Troubleshooting Web Sites

If you go to a site written in a non-English script, but see a series of English nonsense words and punctuation, or a set of question marks, try these steps.

Manually Switch Encoding

For some Web sites, such as www.csssm.org, you will need to manually switch from Western encoding view to the Chinese Traditional encoding.

CHANGE ENCODING

1. Under the View menu, select Character Set
2. If necessary switch from Western to the appropriate encoding.
3. If there is more than one option per script, select one until the page displays properly.
4. AFTER you leave the site, you will have to switch your browser back to Western.

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Override Font

Some Web sites, such as directory.google.com/Top/World/Chinese_Simplified/, specify a font which may not be available on your machine. This problem is prevalent on the Macintosh.

To view the Web site, you need to override the font of the Web page. To override a font, open the font preferences panel (Edit » Preferences select Fonts in panel), then turn on the radio button for Use my fonts, overriding page-specified fonts.

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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: Thursday, 26-Apr-2007 10:30:55 EDT