type

[A. Vine]

David, et al,

You'll most likely want ISO-8859-1.  The vast majority of Western Europe use
ISO-8859-1.  If you have more correspondence in a language which isn't French,
Italian, German, Spanish (known as FIGS), Swedish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian,
Flemish, Finnish, Faeroese, Portuguese, even Icelandic and Irish for the most
part, plus all the languages which only need ASCII, English, Hawaiian, Swahili,
Somali, Indonesian, Latin, some native American languages, etc., contact me.

Mind you, there are a few characters missing in ISO-8859-1 for some of the
Scandinavian and even for French, but many folks just work around them.  If you
really need them, there are other character sets which have them.

You never want UTF-7, its use has long been discouraged.  If you really need
Unicode, choose UTF-8, but be aware that most folks can't handle UTF-8 data yet,
and most folks don't send it yet.

If you're really curious about character sets, I've written a couple of
articles...(shameless plug)

Also, there is a new book out for those who need to do multilingual work on the
computer.  It has excellent advice for PC and Mac setup and use:

"Global Solutions for Multilingual Applications" by Christopher Ott, John Wiley
and Sons, ISBN 0-471-34827-9

Regards,Andrea
--
Andrea Vine, avine at eng.sun.com, iPlanet i18n architect
Guilty feet have got no rhythm.
-- George Michael

David Bergdahl wrote:
>
> Specifically: on netscape in the Preferences menu one can select "use
> page-specified fonts, including Dynamic Fonts" and under the View menu there's
> one called Character set that let's one choose ISO-8859-1 or MacRoman and
> single-language sets...all the way down to Unicode UTF-8 and UTF-7.
>
> --any guidance from the more technologically adept for which settings one
> should use for the occasional foreign or phonetic character?
>