I've not tested all of the 'insert special characters' options, but there is one, Black right-pointing pointer, that looks good in my editor, but turns into a '?' when I render the generated HTML in a web page.
What might cause that? Can I easily fix it?
When I look at the file plugins/specialchar/lang/en.js, it shows that with a value of 9658. Seems like most of the other special chars use named HTML entities, but this one is a number.
I noted there are a few others with numbers, like 'Latin capital letter w with circumflex" and it does the same showing '?' in my page when rendered.
I noted I am using charset=ISO-8859-1. Is that the problem? Should I be using UTF-8?
What might cause that? Can I easily fix it?
When I look at the file plugins/specialchar/lang/en.js, it shows that with a value of 9658. Seems like most of the other special chars use named HTML entities, but this one is a number.
I noted there are a few others with numbers, like 'Latin capital letter w with circumflex" and it does the same showing '?' in my page when rendered.
I noted I am using charset=ISO-8859-1. Is that the problem? Should I be using UTF-8?
Re: Insert special character: Black right-pointing pointer
<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=utf-8" session="true" isELIgnored="true" %>
and I'm using XHTML transitional doctype if that matters.
Re: Insert special character: Black right-pointing pointer
What do you mean by "but turns into a '?' when I render the generated HTML in a web page."
What happens between displaying page inside editor and rendering your web page? Writing code to DB, processing code on server side? Whatever that is you should start checking there for differences in encoding.
Re: Insert special character: Black right-pointing pointer
In the CKEditor source mode, it shows:
<p>These have issues: ► Ŵ but these don't: ™ ⇔ ♦ á ¶ ¥</p>
So I was a bit surprised that those special characters are shown directly rather than using entity escapes.
Is there a reason why the special characters defined with numbers are written "as is" rather than using an HTML entity like c as that would certainly work best? This would match the special characters that are defined with named entities like "™ ⇔ ♦ á ¶ ¥" that don't suffer any such issues.
=== Update ===
Changed my JSP writing code from a FileWriter->BufferedWriter->PrintWriter to use FileOutputStream->OutputStreamWriter(utf-8)->PrintWriter and the JSP file itself now shows the special characters correctly. Sadly, when I run the JSP, though, it still shows '?'. So I wonder if there's something about Tomcat 7 that is causing it to misread the JSP?!?!?
Re: Insert special character: Black right-pointing pointer
http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/FAQ/CharacterEncoding
Re: Insert special character: Black right-pointing pointer
Re: Insert special character: Black right-pointing pointer
Re: Insert special character: Black right-pointing pointer
Every single special character encodes just fine except the numeric ones, and they would work exactly the same as the named entities if the plugin just used the same logic of output HTML entities instead.
Instead I had to change my HTML encoding, the file encoding when I write it out, as well as the servlet response encoding. Yes, that works, but sticking with HTML standard formats would solve matters, too, be consistent and not require users of CKEditor to deal with it at all.