Symptoms

After you store a MGTEK Browser Help system on an Apache web-server, the web-browser may not display all characters correctly.

Cause

Some configurations of Apache are set to override the encoding through the directive AddDefaultCharset. This directive will set the content type in the HTTP header, which forces the web browser to always assume the specified encoding. If the specified encoding does not match the encoding used to generate the HTML pages, certain characters will not display correctly.

Resolution

To fix this problem, edit the Apache configuration file “httpd.conf”. Search for the line containing the AddDefaultCharset directive and remove it or comment it out.

#AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1

Background Information

HTML pages are encoded with codepages, such as ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8. To display the page correctly, the web browser must use the same codepage as the one used to encode the HTML page. To determine the codepage, the web browser examines the HTTP content header and the content-type META tag of the HTML file. Help Producer always sets the content type META tag (using UTF-8 by default) to specify the encoding. If the META tag is overridden through the content type specified in the HTTP header, the web browser will use encoding specified in the HTTP header, which may be incorrect.

Applies To

See Also

Conversion Problems | Troubleshooting