# Encoding: Question marks where there should be accents?



## panjabigator

How do I correct my computer so that I accent marks display?  Sometimes I see them and other times it's just a question mark.

Example:





> Je suis d'accord ? ce que le fran?ais est en effet une langue riche (sans doute la plus riche dans l'Europe)


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## jann

Check your character encoding.  This setting is located in the "view" menu of your web browser.  Often changing between e.g., Unicode and Western will solve the problem.

In Internet Explorer:  View > Encoding
In Firefox: View > Character Encoding

Does this fix it for you?


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## panjabigator

Should I be in Unicode or Western?  Right now I'm viewing in Western, but Unicode is highly useful for me because I read in Indic scripts pretty often.


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## jann

Well for me, I am a French-English moderator... so my experience is mostly with French and English web pages.  I believe your browser should automatically detect the page encoding most of the time.  When I have problems viewing a page, it is usually a French one, and in these cases I have to change my encoding from Unicode to Western.  I don't know what settings work for pages with Indic scripts.

I am not a web specialist, but it seems to me that this is not a permanent setting.  So just change it to whatever fixes the problem on the given page... and then change it again later if you need to. It really is quite easy to toggle between different encodings. 

If my limited knowledge isn't enough to fix the troubles you're having, please post a more detailed description or provide a link to a webpage that you have trouble viewing properly... and then wait for members more experienced than I


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## panjabigator

Thank you so much!  Merci beaocoup (the extent of the French I know!)


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## Jana337

Some browsers have an auto-detect function.

I can't offer a generally valid tip because the legibility of other people's texts also depends on their settings, not only on your ones. Whenever I encounter a problem, I have to go through a process of trial and error.


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## mkellogg

The forum pages use ISO-8859-1 encoding, which is extremely close to basic ascii or Windows-1252.  While that might not make any sense to you, if you have problems seeing accents in the forums, you might want to check your browser's choice of encoding for these pages. (Menu>View>Encoding or 'Character Encoding').  It should have ISO-8859-1 selected.

panjabigator, so I can see the technical aspects, can you give us two links - one to a page with accents you can see and another to a page with accents you can't see.  I think I know the problem and would like to fix it.  But both posts have to be no more than 6 months old.  There was a change in the encoding sometime before then.


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## panjabigator

Thanks Mike!  I'll search and find some sites to post.


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## mkellogg

Sites?  I meant threads and posts. I only control the WordReference sites. 

If _another site_ has this problem, then the encoding is set wrong or there are other encoding problems inside the server.  This happens a lot if the site is getting an external data feed or drawing its content from a database.  (I have spent many, many hours dealing with these issues myself unfortunately!)


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