Tutorials

Saving HTML Files with UTF-8 Encoding

WebCT 4.0 allows for mulit-language capabilities by using the UTF-8 character set. This character set allows more graphic languages, such as Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Japanese, to be displayed on the web without the use of a special plugin. Because WebCT 4.0 uses this character set as the default, .html and text files should be converted to UTF-8 to be properly displayed.

The conversion to UTF-8 can be accomplished in two ways: the files can be saved from within Word as a UTF-8 html document or it can be converted from inside WebCT itself.

Saving a UTF-8 File Using Microsoft Word

This small change only needs to be made once to set the "Save as a Web Page" feature to always save as UTF-8.

• In Word for Windows --> from the Tools menu choose Options
• In Word 2001 or earlier --> from the File menu choose Preferences
• In Word X and 2004 --> from the Word menu choose Preferences

The rest of the directions are the same for Mac and PC.

• From the General tab choose Web Options
• Click the Encoding tab then, from the dropdown menu, choose UTF-8
• If you wish to make this the default for all future web pages, click the Always Save Web Pages in the Default Encoding
• Click OK then click OK again.

Converting a File from within WebCT

If you have a file that is loaded into WebCT and is it displaying using odd characters such as boxes or Japanese characters then you will need to convert it .

1. Go to the file manager (Control Panels --> Manage Files)
2. From the file list, click the radio button next to the file containing the odd characters
3. From the right Actions menu, click on Convert Char Set
4. From the dropdown menu choose the character set used when the file was created.
• From the dropdown menu, select Western European (windows)
• Select Preview
• The file should appear the correct way, minus the odd characters.
• If not, change the dropdown menu to Western European (iso-8859)
• Select Preview
5. Once your preview looks correct, click on the Convert button. This will convert the file to the UTF-8 character set and your documents will look good.