This is a little off-topic, but I'm hoping someone knows the answer.

I've got Thai fonts installed on my computer. However, I'm now in Brazil for a month and trying to absorb some Portuguese. I've found that when I go to Poruguese web sites, some of the non-English characters and diacritical marks show up as Thai characters.

Does anyone know about this and how to switch to a true view of Portuguese? I can uninstall my Thai fonts if need be, but it would be better if I didn't have to.

Thanks!

The answer may depend on your browser. If you are using IE, choose menu item view, encoding, Western European to convert from Thai display to Western European (a.k.a. Latin-1). Do this before entering anything in a form. Changing encoding resets all forms.

The probable cause of this is web pages that do not specify their encoding. Portuguese and Thai 8-bit encodings (chiefly Latin-1 and TIS-620 respectively) give radically different interpretations to bytes with the high bit set.

I don't know why your machine should choose Thai over Latin-1. On my machine (Windows XP, English menus), I have British and US International keyboards (input language UK English) and Thai keyboards (input language Thai) set up. I now observe the curious fact that when I want to save a file edited in Notepad as 'ANSI', it allows the TIS-620 extension of ASCII, but not the Latin-1 extension, which would be the natural one given such English words as fiancée. Perhaps my PC has now decided that, despite the operating system menus being in English, it's really a Thai PC.