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June 17, 2009 1:58 PM   Subscribe

IRAN ELECTION FILTER: I am looking to create a few web pages to mirror some information back in to Iran. What editor should I use that will recognize Arabic script and what tags do I need to use to define the language when writing the HTML?

To clarify a bit further, I have the text already in Farsi. I am looking to take information that is on pages that have been blocked/filtered by the Iranian government and put it in a simple plain text only page which I will host on a server that I have access to. I tried to use Notepad++ to create the pages but it does not like Farsi. Also I have never created a web page in another language so I don't know what tags to put in to define the language. Please help!
posted by anonymous to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)
 
As regards text editors - try BabelPad or SC UniPad. You should look to save the file as Unicode.

Are you looking to serve the text as HTML or are you hosting a TXT file which can be downloaded and displayed? For HTML you can see here for the code that can be put in the header. Replace the charset with "charset=utf-8"

You can Metamail me if you like and I can help.
posted by clarkie666 at 3:06 PM on June 17, 2009


Sorry screwed up the BabelPad link.
posted by clarkie666 at 3:08 PM on June 17, 2009


Also you can add dir="rtl" to the <html> tag to force the page to display from right to left. Therefore header is
<html dir="rtl">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
</head>
<body>
posted by clarkie666 at 3:46 PM on June 17, 2009


You should look to save the file as Unicode

You should specifically look to save the file as UTF-8. Other variants of Unicode (e.g UTF-16/UCS-2) are not well-supported by all browsers.
posted by Brak at 5:05 PM on June 17, 2009


I should further chime in on clarkie666's other suggestions, in the affirmative. You pretty much want to specifically use UTF-8 as your encoding, as it's by far the most widely supported text encoding for web servers, web browsers...most everything web that requires the transmission and/or display of text/markup. And it supports pretty much any character set that you're going to want to throw at it, including Farsi.

The <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> tag will ensure that any browser that might otherwise be confused about the encoding of the content will apply the proper encoding for its rendering of your pages.

Other than that, you should be pretty much good to go with copying and pasting into a Unicode-aware editor; just make sure you save your file as UTF-8.
posted by Brak at 5:16 PM on June 17, 2009


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