I'm a novice with MT and am trying to teach myself the program to manage a bilingual website for an NGO based in the Netherlands. When I insert French texts into the site, including the necessary accents, what I end up getting is a bunch of jumbled characters that make everything completely illegible (ex. La Benevolencija est dotée d'un conseil universitaire auquel appartient le psychologue et spécialiste renommé du génocide Ervin Staub de l'Université du Massachusetts.). I have no idea how to resolve this issue and am under the gun to get the site up and running. If anyone could offer a suggestion, I'd be most appreaciative! Thanks a lot.

Hi there,

This is not really an MT problem, but a charset problem. In your header module, look for this line:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso blah blah blah" />

and make sure your charset is utf-8:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

That should solve most accented character problems.
Hope that helps!

If you share with us your Web site URL we will be able to provide you the exact solution

For instance, you may just have to enter an encoding directive to your mt-config.cgi file, or update an older reference if there is one already...

Publish your Web site URL or send it via PM and your problem would be fixed

My URL is www.labenevolencija.org. I have since taken most of the French pages offline to avoid utter embarrassment.

Thanks very much!

Andrew

Are you writing the text in a text editor and then pasting to movable type?

Or are you just writing the french text on movable type?

Usually the former, although I would like to be able to do both.

Good, so you are writing the text in an editor and then pasting it to movable type...

Can you do a test and go inside movable type, then rewrite a piece of text which contains a bad character and save

What is the result? Is the issue fixed?

I just cut and pasted the introduction page (containing perfect accents) and got this: http://www.labenevolencija.org/fr/home.html

So I'm afraid there's still a problem.

Thanks a lot for your efforts!

I've checked your movable type and while the character looks good inside MT (UTF-8 encoding), the output is filled with bad characters for each and every accent!

Your issue is that on your server HTML files are forced to have ISO-8859-1 as charset, instead of using the charset that you are declaring on the page sourc code, meta section (the modern UTF-8 standard used by movable type).

The key proving this statement is the result we get trying to validate a page with bad characters from your Web site

i.e.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%...ine&group=0



While there are ways to customize this at your level, my advice is to contact your hosting support and to ask them to remove that ISO-8859-1 charset imposing rule for .HTML files...

Alternatively, if you supply me access to your server FTP via PM, I should be able to fix it for you...