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What's Global Moxie?

Global Moxie is the hypertext laboratory of Josh Clark, whose projects include the Big Medium web content management system. Josh creates web applications and websites from his multimedia studio in Paris, France.

What's Big Medium?

Big Medium is flexible, easy-to-use server software for creating and editing websites directly from your browser. Check out the features or download now.

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Home > Help! > Big Medium FAQ > Page Display

Why don't accented characters display correctly?

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Question

Accented characters look fine when I enter them in Big Medium, so why do they get garbled on the published pages?

Answer

Once you get beyond the basic characters of ABC's and 123's, computers use special encoding methods to display accented characters, non-western characters, even curly quotes. The trouble is, there are many of these encoding methods and they aren't compatible.

What's happening on your site is that either the server or your custom template is telling browsers that it's using a different character set (probably ISO-8859-1) than the character set used in Big Medium's pages (UTF-8). The result is that accented characters get garbled or don't display at all.

Are you using custom design templates?

If so, make sure that your templates use the <%htmlhead%> widget instead of your own <head> tags.

If your templates do include <%htmlhead%>, and you still see the problem, it's a server configuration issue.

Adjust the Server's Default Character Set

Although Big Medium declares its character encoding in the HTML of the page itself, the web server can override this, causing the current problem. When that happens, the web server basically breaks the display of accented characters.

If your site is on an Apache web server, the problem is likely a setting in the server's httpd.conf configuration file that looks like this:

AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1

It should be changed to:

AddDefaultCharset Off

In Linux systems, the httpd.conf file is often located here:

/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

If none of this makes sense to you, or if you don't have access to the httpd.conf configuration file, check with your server administrator for help.

If he or she is unwilling to make this change, you can also do it yourself via your site's .htaccess file, if it's enabled for your Apache server. Check to see if there's a file in your server's main web directory named .htaccess. If so, add the following line to it:

AddDefaultCharset Off

If not, create a file named .htaccess that consists only of the above line, and upload it to your site's main web directory.

More from this section

Home > Help! > Big Medium FAQ > Page Display
Why don't accented characters display correctly?
How to resolve encoding conflicts between your server and Big Medium.
Why are some widgets not showing up on my pages?
What to do if your announcements, tips or some link widgets are not making it into your pages.
How do I make Big Medium generate “curly quotes” and other typographic finery?
Use the SmartyPants plugin for Big Medium.
How do I password-protect sites managed by Big Medium?
Keeping your site (or portions of it) private.
Why are the images in my custom templates broken on some pages?
Troubleshoot broken images in your templates.
Why do Flash animations obscure parts of my page?
Tips for fixing flash movies that "float" above other page elements, including dropdown menus and enlarged/slideshow images.
Can I split articles into multiple pages?
Yes, download the custom plugin that enables this feature in Big Medium.
Can I add additional data fields to my Big Medium pages?
This tutorial walks you through the creation of a custom plugin to add additional data fields to Big Medium.
Why doesn’t Big Medium’s search find my pages?
Big Medium’s maintenance script may not be set up correctly.

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—Clifford Smith

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—Karen Kaiser

"I have to say that Big Medium is one of the easiest web applications I have ever used. Once I realized how complete the admin panel is, it was hard to stop tweaking my site! I love this application!"
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