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diacritical marks not consistent


Lee Fausak

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I occasionally use foreign characters (German, Polish, Swedish, etc) with various diacritical marks.  The diacriticals show up correctly on some TNG pages, but not on others.

Shown below is a case where the diacriticals are formed correctly on the Admin>Places page (top), but when the place name appears on an individual person page they are garbled (bottom).

I am, at best, and intermediate TNG user but can usually follow directions.  The website from which the images were taken is www.fausak.org.

Any suggestions about how to solve this problem while keeping the diacriticals?

Thanks in advance.

Lee Fausak

TNG_1.jpg

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When I view a page like this

http://www.fausak.org/places-oneletter.php?offset=3&psearch=Płońsk%2C+Mazowieckie%2C+Poland

it says the Character Set is ISO-8859-1 and the characters are garbled. But if I change my browser to tell it to view the page as UTF-8 then it displays correctly.

So...

Go to your TNG Admin ----> Setup -----> General Settings -----> Language and make sure it says UTF-8 there for the character set and not ISO-8859-1.

See if that changes what you see.

Roger

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  • 4 years later...
On 10/29/2016 at 9:46 AM, theKiwi said:

Go to your TNG Admin ----> Setup -----> General Settings -----> Language and make sure it says UTF-8 there for the character set and not ISO-8859-1.

I am having a similar issue when importing from a GEDCOM. In the example below, you can see that TNG replaced a diacritic with a question mark for the given name and removed it altogether where I reference the name in the notes section.

I verified that my language is set to UTF-8.

Thoughts? If there is not fix for this, is there a search feature where I can search for question marks in my content? I know that still won't help me with situations where the marks have been removed altogether....

Thanks!

diacritical marks on import.jpg

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13 hours ago, gracielou said:

I am having a similar issue when importing from a GEDCOM. In the example below, you can see that TNG replaced a diacritic with a question mark for the given name and removed it altogether where I reference the name in the notes section.

 

Is the GEDCOM file created as UTF-8? Look in the GEDCOM file in the first few lines and see if here's a line CHAR - what does it say?

Is the file encoded as UTF-8? NotePad++ on Widows or BBEdit on Mac OS X will tell you the file's encoding

Is your database set to UTF-8? Look at the database with phpMyAdmin from your cPanel and see what it says for the collation of the tables in the database

Roger

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Having the same problem, I checked my gedcom file which is UTF-8, Then checked the TNG settings which are also UTF-8. Finally I went to my C Panel and checked the database Collation setting which was latin1_swedish_ci ! Not UTF-8 ....Should it be UTF-8_general_cs ?

 

Screenshot 2021-01-30 122325.png

20210130_113513.jpg

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3 things must be in agreement for characters with accents to display correctly:

  • TNG Charset
  • Char set in GEDCOM
  • Database collation sequence
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Thanks, everyone, for your comments. 

My setting were as follows:

  •  GEDCOM = ANSI
  • TNG = UTF-8
  • Database = utf8-general_ci

I don’t see a way to change the encoding for GEDCOM output in my program (RootsMagic3 - yes, RootsMagic3).

(I did some googling and found ANSI isn’t supported in the GEDCOM 5.5.1 specification, but that sometimes program specify the wrong encoding or specify an invalid option. I circled back to my RM3 documentation where it claims to support the GEDCOM 5.5 specification. So in my case, my program is specifying an invalid option.)

I did a hack where I went into the GEDCOM file and changed the value of the CHAR parameter from ANSI to UTF-8. I also saved the file as a UTF-8 document (although I’m not sure this step is needed). I them imported the GEDCOM as usual into TNG. On initial inspection, that seems to have done the trick, and my diacritical marks are showing up. I did this test on a single family, that being the same one in my example at the top of this thread. 

The steps I took are below. I encourage anyone to do an import to a test tree to make sure you get the results you’re looking for.

-gl

 Steps for changing the GEDCOM charset:

  1. Export the GEDCOM.
  2. Open the file in notepad.
    1. Open Notepad.
    2. Choose File>Open and navigate to the folder where the GEDCOM is located. (You won’t see the file until you do the next step.)
    3. At the bottom right of the Open dialog box, click the Text Documents (.txt) button and choose All Files (*.*). Your GEDCOM should appear.
    4. Select the file and click Open.
  3. In the GEDCOM file change CHAR=ANSI to CHAR=UTF-8.
  4. Save the file using File > Save As.
    1. At the bottom right of the Save AS dialog box, from the Encoding drop-down list select UTF-8.
    2. Rename the file.
    3. Click Save. (At the top of file, you’ll see the file name. Note that your file now has two extensions - .ged.txt. You need to remove the .txt extension so you can import the file.
  5. Close the file.
  6. In Windows Explorer, navigate to the saved file location.
  7. Right click on the file name, and choose Rename.
  8. Remove the .txt extension. 
  9. Import the GEDCOM and admire your work :)

 

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