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FAQ

Q. Some characters look strange (little boxes or Asian characters). There was some reference to unicode, but this means nothing to me. How can I see the characters as intended?

A. Short answer: you'll need a unicode font capable of displaying the whole Latin set of subranges, including the IPA characters and diacritics. There are several such fonts available for free download. (Find one now). Additionally, you will need to be using at least Windows 95 (PC) or OS X (Mac). Not detailed enough? Try the
Long answer: If you're not seeing what you think you should be seeing there are a number of possibilities. Answer this question first: Are you using a PC with Windows 95 or newer, or a Macintosh with OS X or newer? If you answered yes to either part of that question we're in business. If you aren't using a relatively new machine your quest ends here. Reason? The page in question has been written with unicode characters that require an operating system capable of displaying double-byte characters. Old systems (Windows 3.1 etc. and Mac OS9.X and older) either have a very hard time displaying these characters, or cannot display them at all. As OS developers have now begun to work together to resolve the font issues of the past in a unified manner you can expect to see more unicoded pages on the internet. An excellent site that outlines the problems and solutions associated with unicode is Alan Wood's Unicode Resources.

Other burning questions? email the site maintainer.