foreign language characters

[Raye]

someone recently has been sending some names on a genealogy list that include characters found in the German alphabet. on my email all I recieve is gibberish where those characters should be. How can I actually view the names as they should be. The list will accept the foreign characters- it is my computer that I can't view them on. First of all would this be a Windows XP problem or a problem with my email - netscape. If Windows, how can I view (and use) character sets from other languages. Note that I do not want to change the language of my main page from English-that would be disastrous. I only want to be able to view and also type these characters in email and Microsoft Word.

Note that I would want to crosspost the answer over to others with a similar interest too.

I have Windows XP service pack 2 and my email is wmconnect now changed to netscape.

Thanks

[XenaWP]

What font is being used?

Arial, Times, or any "normal" TT or unicode fonts should show all the german characters.

Central European languages and Cyrillic can pose a problem.

[doctorgonzo]

For typing different characters, go to the Control Panel, then Regional and Language settings, then the Languages tab, then Details. From there, you can add a keyboard layout so you can type foreign letters. You can add as many keyboard layouts as you want, and you can switch between them at any time.

As for viewing e-mails with foreign characters, are you using an e-mail client like Outlook Express, or is this a web-based e-mail service like Hotmail?

[Raye]

I'll try your tips in a minute but to answer your question as best I can, my email is wal-mart connect that you could pick up in any walmart store (apparently it was associated with AOL somehow). Walmart connect (wmconnect) is now netscape. It is on my desktop not on the web like the free yahoo, and I've never used hotmail so I don't know anything about it and I didn't like outlook express so I only tried it a few times and quit but I'm assuming Netscape is not considered web-based. That is the best I can answer on that score. Does that help at all?

[Raye]

doctorgonzo,

Thank you! That worked with being able to type the German characters. Hope you'll forgive a few more questions.

1. is there a way to view the "new" keyboard on screen to find where the letters are located on an "english" keyboard? I found some of them hidden under things like the colon key, Quote key, bracket key, etc.

2. I went and browsed the old email list and it still picks up the name with the German characters as gibberish. I accessed this in internet explorer not my email.

Thank you again for your help.

[XenaWP]

Until you change the default font it will always look like gibberish. Many programs/browsers use a default font of MS Sans Serif or some other gutted font that lacks support for extended ascii characters. Set it to Arial or Times.

Look in Start - Accessories - System Tools - Character Map to find key equivalents. Usually, for accented/foreign characters, you have to hold the alt key and press a 3-digit number on the numeric keypad.

Look in Windows help under "extended ascii."

[glc]

In IE, try View - Encoding - and see if choosing a different character set helps.

[Raye]

Thanks all of you. I've learned alot already. Now I know where to find the "cent" key in the character map. and I changed the encoding under view in IE to "auto-select" although I don't know if that did anything. I went back to the list where someone had used german characters in a name and saw the same "gibberish" but then I went over to a german list (picked one at random) and I could see the characters there. Now though I know how to find all kinds of stuff I didn't before except for one thing- how can I find out what characters my IE views things in such as times or arial; under [view] and [encoding] it just says "western european (ISO)"

Thanks again for all ya'lls help!!!