This page covers only international setup information. For general setup information, try the Help Content (F1).   You will also find more information in Product Information and Support under the HELP menu. Netscape's Technical Support pages are also good sources of more information.

For more advanced tips and information, read More Tips and Technical Information page. We also collected links to useful web sites for international users in the Links page.

Introduction:

Communicator 4 like its predecessor Navigators 2 and 3 is a multilingual network tool. All versions of Communicator 4, e.g. US Communicator, Japanese Communicator, German Communicator, etc., possess the same international capabilities to display web pages, mail messages, and news articles in many different languages when appropriate fonts are installed on the user's system. All Communicator versions can also compose documents, and mail and news messages when appropriate fonts are available. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean require additional Input Method modules. The main difference between the English Communicator and any localized Communicator is that the menus have been translated into the local language. There are no functional differences otherwise.

There are 2 main things any International users should pay attention to during the initial setup and subsequent use. Be it Mail/News, Browser, or Composer, these 2 settings are the keys to successful international use. They are:

1. Setting the correct fonts for the encodings you will be using.
2. Selecting the correct encoding option for different languages.

Encoding and Fonts:

What is encoding and how are fonts related to it? An encoding is a method by which a document or message has been converted to computerized data. All web documents and mail/new messages have been encoded by this definition. The term character set is also sometimes used to refer to encoding.

Some languages, e.g. most of the Western languages, share the same encoding method, but others, e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, etc., use different encoding methods. Thus an encoding is not necessarily equivalent to a language -- one encoding such as Western may be used for many languages.

Most network documents and messages often don't indicate what encoding they have been created in. This situation will probably change as more web page designers begin to label their document's encoding information clearly, and as more mail and news agents follow MIME specifications. At present, however, this may not always be the case. Since the same bits of data may correspond to different characters depending on what the character set is, Communicator needs to be told which encoding a document or message you are viewing has been created in. This is accomplished by the use of a menu item called View | Encoding that you see in some of the windows. What about a window that does not have its own View | Encoding Menu? Generally the encoding for a window without an independent encoding menu will be inherited from the last window from which you opened this new window.

Since an encoding is meant for some specific language(s), it is necessary to designate the fonts you will be using for each encoding in the Fonts Preferences section. Although there are 11 families of encodings available in Communicator, the user needs to set the fonts only for the languages that the user plans to work with. Typically, the user will set the fonts for the native language (e.g. Japanese) encoding and then for the Western encoding. The Western encoding is used for most of the Western European languages such as French, German, Spanish, and Swedish. It is also used for English.

Setup Instructions for Encoding and Fonts:

Step 1: Open Edit | Preferences and click on the item Appearance | Font. This will display the encoding and font selection menu as illustrated here.

Now select the encoding you want to set the fonts for, and choose the fonts for both the Variable and Fixed width types.
 

• The variable-width font is the default font used for displaying and composing HTML documents and mail or new messages. The fixed font is the default for non-HTML display and composition. The latter is typically used in displaying plain-text documents in the browser window, mail/news messages, and composing non-HTML mail/news messages. The difference between the two is that in the fixed-width type, each character always takes up the same width while in the variable-width type, the width varies from character to character.
• Windows and Mac users will see all the encoding names and font names whether or not they match up. Unix users will see only the names of those fonts meant for the specific encoding, and an encoding name will be displayed only if matching fonts are available for that encoding on the system.

Dynamic Fonts:

Setup: The Dynamic Font use is the default. With this setting, when Communicator visits a page which uses Dynamic fonts, it will display the page with the fonts provided by the page itself.

Documents may contain their own font specification --> the default choice is "Use the document-specified font, including Dynamic Fonts."

Here are some samples of Dynamic Fonts (Eyeballs, Japanese).

When you are ready to use any one of these Communicator components, use the View | Encoding Menu to set the encoding option for the language of your choice. If a window has an encoding menu, you will find it under the Edit Menu. Choose the encoding and you will see a check mark beside your choice.

• For browsing web pages, change the encoding setting as you encounter pages written in different languages.
• The meaning of the encoding choice is slightly different from window to window. For the Browser, your choice means "the document I am displaying is in the encoding I have chosen". For the Mail/News, the meaning of the encoding is the same as the Browser for the display part, but for writing messages and articles to post to newsgroups, it means "I will be sending this message or news article in the encoding I have chosen". For the Composer, it means "I will be composing this HTML document in the chosen encoding".
• In the encoding menu, different encoding families are separated by horizontal lines. Some language, e.g. Japanese, Chinese, etc., may have more than one way to encode documents/messages.
• In cases where there is an Auto-Detect choice, Communicator provides an automatic detection mechanism among different encoding of the same family. For display, choose the Auto-Detect selection whenever one is available.
• After you have selected your usual encoding setting, you can choose Set Default Encoding. For the Browser window, the default encoding will be the one you will see when you first bring up Communicator. As long as you don't re-set the Default Encoding, the default will stay the same even if you temporarily switch to another encoding.

As a browser sends out requests to receive documents from servers, it also also sends other pieces of information about itself. They might include the name and version of the browser client, its Internet address, etc. Communicator also sends out a list of Accept-Language(s) which tells servers in which language(s) it would like to see the requested document if available. If the server in question has the requested document in the language matching the list, it can send back the document in the language preferred by the user. Some web sites are taking advantage of this feature by preparing the same page in several different languages and then serving the page that matches the user's Accept-Language choice(s). The example above indicates the user's preferred languages to be Japanese, followed by English.
 

 
Setting Accept-Language(s): Open the Edit | Preferences Menu and select Navigator | Language Menu. This will bring up the Accept-Language Window as illustrated here. Now click on the Add button. The list of possible Accept-Languages will be displayed. Select a language and click on OK button. You can add more than 1 languages, and you can re-priortize the ranking of the languages you have selected by using the Up and Down arrows.
 

Fonts for display:

More font/setup information: After reading this section on fonts, you might want to consult this page written by one of Netscape International engineers for more detailed and technical information for setting up Asian language display under US Windows 95/NT.

Windows and Unix users can display different languages by simply installing appropriate fonts for the platforms, and correctly setting them for the matching encodings. With Communicator's multi-lingual functionality, users can display many different languages under US Windows 95/NT or Unix operating systems.

Note: The fonts used for Windows version of Communicator must conform to official Unicode character mappings for Windows. Sometimes, free fonts available on the Internet may not adhere to these known standards. Display with such hacked fonts may be incomplete or may not work at all with Communicator.

Macintosh users can display different non-Western languages by installing Apple's Language Kits, or by installing Macintosh OS for the language in question. Mac users are somewhat limited in that good display may not be available by simply installing appropriate fonts. Two system components needed for display are WorldScript II and a separate script bundle for each language. WorldScript II is part of Apple's System Software for System 7 families but script bundles are generally not available without the Language Kits. While fonts + WorldScript II alone can display CJK, good quality display may not be available without the appropriate script bundle.

Where to get fonts:

Windows: Because CJK fonts are quite complex and large in size, they are generally not available free. Major font vendors carry Asian fonts and so they would be good sources for them. There are also a few good free or trial fonts. For example, BitStream offers a Windows 95/NT trial font called Cyberbit which contains glyphs for many languages including CJK, European languages, etc. Cyberbit Multi-lingual Font is included in the CD-ROM for the US Windows version of Communicator. Currently Cyberbit Font does not work well as a multilingual font under Asian Windows 95 systems.  It works fine as a multilingual font under Asian Windows NT4 systems.  Read More Tips and Technical Information page for updated information on this.

Microsoft ftp site distributes freely what is known as Windows 95/NT IE fonts for Pan-European, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, grouped under the Multilanguage Support. All you need to do is to run the executable support files you get and the fonts will be installed properly. Pan-European is a set of fonts that can display both Western and Central European languages. IE fonts can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/ieplatform/lang/lang.htm

Unix: Users can install specific Locale/Language resources for the languages they want to use. Locale resources generally include appropriate fonts for that Locale and the additional input method(s) if it is for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. The Locale resources are sometimes included in the English OS distribution, and all that users need to do in such a case is to install them. Users should inquire the manufacturer of their OS regarding the availability for specific Locale/Language resources.

If your needs are limited to just displaying languages, instead of installing the entire Locale resources for the languages, you can achieve proper display by installing free X11 fonts for the languages you are interested in. If you attempt this latter, you should note the following points:

• Different Unix operating systems may use different font formats (e.g. bdf, pcf, snf, etc.), and so the user should either obtain the fonts in the correct format for their system, or use a conversion utility to covert between formats. You can check on the format by looking in the X11 fonts directory. You can bring up the lists of X11 fonts directories by xset q.
• If you don't control your Unix system, then ask the system administrator to install them for you in the standard X11 fonts directory. If this is not possible, you can install the obtained fonts into your private directory and use the following command to set the font path. e.g. xset +ftp /usr/users/username/X11fonts
• For more information and font ftp locations, consult the FAQ for Finding Fonts for Internationalization, comp.fonts FAQ, and Internet Font Archive.

Input Method:

For Windows users, there are alternative system add-on components that enable both the display and input method for CJK. Some of these vendors may carry Communicator-compatible add-on components. Netscape cannot guarantee that these products will work with Communicator. Ask the manufacturers such as UnionWay, TwinBridge, NJWin, WinMASS and others if their current offerings work with Communicator for your specific type of Windows.
 

Browsing Tips:

• Occasionally a page may not display correctly even though the fonts and the encoding seems to be correct. In such a case, re-loading the page with View | Reload, refreshing with View | Refresh, or re-sizing the page slightly may do the trick.
• Auto-Detect may fail on a rare occasion. If an alternative encoding is available for that language, then switch to it to see if that would not solve the problem.
• Netscape is recommending to web sites managers that they indicate in each document what encoding that document has been encoded in. Some sites are already using this convenient feature to take the guess work and labor out of users. When you visit pages properly marked with the encoding information, Communicator will refer to this information to use the correct fonts set for that encoding. It does not matter what encoding the user has set in the encoding menu.
• Some servers (e.g. Netscape Enterprise servers) allow the web site manager to transmit encoding information along with the document they send out. This HTTP header information can also help Communicator use appropriate fonts for the document. Regardless of what encoding setting Communicator has currently, Communicator will use the server-originated character set information to choose the correct fonts for that document.

Mail/News Tips:

• Communicator's standard mail format is HTML. There are many different ways to make your messages lively and informative in the language of your choice, e.g. Bold, Italic, colors, strike through, Bigger Size, etc. These are useful tools for collaborating on documents, correcting essays/compositions for educators, sending high-impact mail messages, etc. These and many other stylistic controls are available in all the languages Communicator supports.
• Each Mailbox and News folder carries its own independent encoding setting. As you move from Inbox, Sent Mail, Draft, etc. folders, you may find that the encoding setting also changes. This provides a convenient way of storing messages written in one language one folder, and those written in another language in another folder. If you find messages or articles unreadable, simply change the encoding setting to an appropriate one. You should get your proper display back. Even though you may "set default" item on the menu, there is no need to use it for Mailbox and News folders because the change you make is permanent until you set it differently later.
• The Address Book fields can accept European accents, and CJK characters. However, it is not a good idea to use anything other than 7-bit ASCII characters for the Email Address itself. If you want to input 8-bit characters, then use the following template: Name_in_8bit <userid@somewhere.com> where the real e-mail address uses only the legal 7-bit ASCII and is enclosed within the angled brackets.
• Since the Address Book does not have its own encoding setting, the window from which it is opened (parent window) must have set the encoding of the language you wish to use in the Address Book.
• There is an independent encoding menu in the New Mail Composer window. It is a good idea to check what encoding this window is set to, before the user starts composing a new message. Though you can change the encoding while composing a message, this may on occasion lead to corruption of characters, and therefore is not recommended.
• On rare occasions, you may find mail messages arriving at the recipient's mail box corrupted. If you experience this problem, there is one thing you should check. See if the browser's encoding is not set to one that is different from the new Mail Composer window. If so, change the browser encoding so that it will match that of the new Mail Composer window, and try sending a message again.
• You can send a message to both mail account users and newsgroups. But the encoding must be identical for both messages. (Cf. For newsgroups, you fill in a proper address for the header called Group.)

HTML Composer Tips:

• The very first thing the user should do when composing a new message is setting the encoding to the language you want to compose in. Make sure also that the fonts have been set correctly for that encoding.
• Your encoding choice would be automatically added to any HTML document created by Communicator in the form of a Meta tag inserted between <HEAD> ... </HEAD>. The precise form of this tag can be viewed by opening View | Page Source or Format | Page Colors and Properties | Meta Meta Tags. This tag makes your HTML documents immediately decipherable by browsers which understand it.
• Once composing is started, switching the encoding setting is not recommended.
• You can copy/cut and paste into a Composer document from Browser and Composer windows. Generally copy/cut/paste across different encodings will not work well and is therefore not recommended. There are some limited cases where this is not a problem, e.g. you can copy/cut a purely ASCII text and paste into a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean document. (Read More Tips and Technical Information page for additional information.)
• Asian fonts contain an equivalent of US ASCII set of characters. It is customary to write purely English HTML documents under an Asian encoding such as Japanese. We recommend, however, that the user choose the Western encoding if the document contains nothing but English in it. This is because non-breaking spaces (NBSP) in English are treated better under the Western encoding. We also recommend the use of the Western encoding for HTML mail composition for the same reason if only ASCII characters are contained in the mail message.