TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
In response to Razia Ghani,
Matt Craver <MCraver -at- OPENSOLUTIONS -dot- COM> wrote:
>Razia:
>I think what you are experiencing here is Unicode shenanigans. You
>don't specify, but I assume you are creating the Greek characters using
>the Symbol font. The Symbol font uses a new type of character encoding
>called Unicode, which Doc-2-Help supports. Most normal font sets, and
>most programs out there, only support ANSI character codes. Look at:
>http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q160/0/22.asp for more
>information. This Knowledge Base article contains a VBA script that is
>supposed to convert Unicode fonts to ANSI fonts, but you may lose some
>characters. The article also provides more information on the problem.
I think this response is partly right, but misses one important point.
Razia's original question related to losing the Greek characters when
converting to HTML using HelpSite. The real issue here is that standard
HTML only uses characters that are defined in the ISO 8859-1 (Latin 1)
character set, which includes exactly one Greek character (mu, the
standard scientific/engineering abbreviation for the micro- prefix). The
Web Design Group's website has a nice presentation of the HTML
character set with decimal code numbers and entity names of all
allowable characters at http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/charset