Gmail Not Showing Thai Characters

[capeforever]

hi, can anyone tell me how to set gmail so it displays both english and thai characters?

currently it doesn't show thai characters at all in received emails such as the updates i receive from thaivisa....

any help appreciated

Edited April 27, 2010 by capeforever

[Daffy D]

Is it only in Gmail?

If you use IE click on "View" then "Encoding" and select or add Thai to the list.

[321niti123]

Hotmail works well with thai, you might want to try that if you have an account, but i would try checking the encoding first as Daffy suggested.

[capeforever]

Hotmail works well with thai, you might want to try that if you have an account, but i would try checking the encoding first as Daffy suggested.

Thanks guys the encoding worked...

[desi]

Gmail:

I get Thai characters if coming via a blog.

I get garbage if coming from ThaiVisa.

What gives?

[Richard W]

Gmail:

I get Thai characters if coming via a blog.

I get garbage if coming from ThaiVisa.

What gives?

View source to check for an explicit specification of the encoding, e.g.

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

on Thai Visa. Browsers sometimes don't switch encoding if what's being displayed isn't tagged with its encoding. I've found that a lot with Yahoo groups.

[CSS]

Gmail:

I get Thai characters if coming via a blog.

I get garbage if coming from ThaiVisa.

What gives?

View source to check for an explicit specification of the encoding, e.g.

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

on Thai Visa. Browsers sometimes don't switch encoding if what's being displayed isn't tagged with its encoding. I've found that a lot with Yahoo groups.

Yeah, the Thai script has always come across as gibberish in the ThaiVisa e-mails for me too. I'm sorry I didn't quite understand your suggestion. For me, within gmail if I change the encoding it reloads the page and closes the e-mail. Gmail does have a link to view the original e-mail source and I can change the encoding on that page. However, none of the encodings seem to correct it. Pasting it into Thai2English does work but that is too much of a hassle for most e-mails. Do you know the solution for getting the Thai script from ThaiVisa new topic notification e-mails to show correctly? Thanks.

[Rikker]

Try this:

In Internet Explorer 8: Tools > Internet Options > General > Languages > then add Thai to the list

In Firefox: Tools > Options > Content > Languages > Choose your preferred language for displaying pages > add Thai to the list

In Chrome: Wrench icon > Options > Under the hood > Change font and language settings > Default encoding = Thai (also on the Languages tab in the same window, add Thai to the list of browsing languages)

In the past you could fix the problem you're describing (in most cases) by setting Thai as the default encoding in your browser settings. So whenever a webpage isn't explicitly tagged it would assume the page was in Thai.

In the latest versions of the major browsers it's slightly different -- you create a list of languages you typically read webpages in, instead of setting a single default language, and the browser tries to be smart in other ways about which language the page should be shown in. For example, if you manually change the encoding to a language on your list, the encoding will be "sticky" whenever you visit that page after that. (At least, that's how it appears to work.)

FYI This won't cause any problems for most non-Thai websites, because they will usually explicitly state what the encoding should be, in which case the browser just follows what is stated in the HTML. The reason Thai websites so often fail to set the encoding is that developers don't think about non-Thai users. In Thailand virtually computer will have Thai as the default browsing language, so developers aren't forced to think about the fact that every computer in the world outside of Thailand isn't set to interpret pages as Thai by default.

One website to test your browser settings on is the Royal Institute Dictionary:

http://rirs3.royin.go.th

This site doesn't tag its encoding, so if you've set your browser default to Thai, then it shows up in Thai. If not, it shows as gobbledygook. If it's not displaying properly and it's your first time to the site, manually changing the encoding (View > Character Encoding > Thai), and see if the next time you visit the same site the encoding setting sticks.

[CSS]

Thanks for the reply, Rikker. It seemed like the write answer and would work and I'm sure many people just getting into the use of Thai on their computer will find it quite useful. However, I had already added Thai to that list, so unfortunately it didn't solve my particular problem. I'm not sure what it is about ThaiVisa e-mails but the Thai shows up garbled and using the standard three Thai encodings doesn't correct them. I don't have problems with other e-mails in Thai or with other Thai websites, just ThaiVisa "new topic" notification e-mails that have Thai within. I'm wondering if there is a character encoding that I don't know about and am not trying that is actually the correct encoding for these e-mails. Although, I'm inclined to just give up on it as it's not too much of an inconvenience to just log onto ThaiVisa and see the actual new topic if I want to know what it said. Thanks though.

[Rikker]

Hmm, beats me. Does the problem persist on different browsers, or is it specific to one?

[CSS]

Hmm, beats me. Does the problem persist on different browsers, or is it specific to one?

It's persistent throughout Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.