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LOCATION: Web Developers » Developing Tips » FrontPage Tips

Using FrontPage (Windows)

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Many developers use Microsoft FrontPage on a PC in conjunction with the Windows keyboard utilities to create non-English Web sites. This is an effective tool, but care must be taken not to make the pages incompatible outside a PC computer.

Tools Needed

Users need to have the Windows keyboards input locales for that script and fonts compliant with the encoding.

Typing Accents

Accented letters can be inserted via the Insert Symbol palette or via Windows Alt codes. When using Alt codes, check the code in HTML view to be sure the entity codes have been used.

Configuring FrontPage for Other Scripts

Changing Default Encoding

See Front Page instructions at Viet Unicode on how to change the default encoding in Front Page so that all pages are Unicode.

Typing Utilities

Developers need a recent version of Microsoft FrontPage, the relevant fonts installed, and the Windows keyboard for that language or script installed and activated. To configure FrontPage:

NOTE: These instructions are for the Windows version of FrontPage.

  1. Follow the instructions for activating a Windows keyboard through the Regional Options Control Panel.
  2. Open a new document in FrontPage.
  3. Follow the instructions for switching Windows keyboards or "Input Locales".
  4. You should be able to type in the foreign script in FrontPage.

NOTE: Results may vary with different scripts. When in doubt, preview in a live browser.

Cutting and Pasting Unicode Text

Another option is to cut/paste or import Unicode text, then format it for the Web.

When to Use it

This is best used for extended passages of scripts such as Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Thai, Central European languages or Hebrew which are widely supported in browser preferences.

Potential Pitfalls

  1. The HTML code must be inspected for extraneous or vendor-specific tags and modified accordingly. In particular stray FONT FACE tags or style-sheet commands could make a file incompatible on certain browsers and platforms.

    Whenever possible, avoid using any FONT FACE tags or specifying fonts through a style sheet.     Let the browser match the font with the encoding. This avoids developers specifying fonts which have the proper characters in Windows, but not necessarily on a Macintosh.
  2. The output for some scripts, such as Arabic, may not be correct. In those cases, another method is recommended.
  3. For U.S. audiences, it is best to provide instructions to users on how to configure their browsers.
  4. Unfortunately, some scripts may be so undersupported that there may not be a viable encoding system available. In these cases another option should be used.
  5. FrontPage will declare the encoding with the appropriate Microsoft Windows encoding scheme with a meta tag.

    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=win-1251"> (Cyrillic Windows)
    </head>

    Make sure the encoding selected by Front Page is a standard encoding used in other pages for your script.
  6. Note on English Web sites - The default encoding for FrontPage is not Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), but in the very similar Windows-1252. In most cases the results will be the same, but there may be an occasional differences between the character specified by Windows-1252 and by Latin-1. If you are using accent characters or special punctuation, you should switch the encoding to ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 to ensure cross-browser consistency.

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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: Wednesday, 01-Aug-2007 14:37:36 EDT