Font Compatibility, Portuguese

[garyinthailand]

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!

[Richard W]

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.