Displaying Hungarian accents properly

If you have problems reading Hungarian text in your web browser, read on.

Above this are two words containing all the Hungarian accented letters, typeset properly.

Árvíztűrő tükörfúrógép

Above this is how your browser displays the two words. It should match the proper example above (although size and font might differ). There should be no invisble, placeholder, badly accented or missized letters.

Árvíztûrõ tükörfúrógép

Above you should see an u with a circumflex and an o with a tilde. Although many Hungarian web pages contain these characters, they are wrong, because there are no such letters in the Hungarian alphabet. Both the u and the o should be with a double acute. (The reason for the wrong characters being so popular is that they are at the same encoding position in ISO-8859-1 as the right characters in ISO-8859-2, and the developers of the web site are unable to specify the encoding.)

Above this is the wrong version e.g., because the u with double acute after the letter t is too small (and the o with the double acute is also too small). This is how Mozilla 1.7.3 (and earlier) displays it when the ``Western'' and the ``Central European'' fonts are not the same. To fix this, select Edit / Preferences / Appearance / Fonts / Fonts for / Western, then select Serif / Times New Roman (not ``Times''), then select Sans-serif / Arial (not ``Helvetica''), then select Fonts for / Central European, then select Serif / Times New Roman (not ``Times''), then select Sans-serif / Arial (not ``Helvetica''), then click OK, reload the page, and it should be OK.

If you are using the Linux version of Mozilla, and the Arial font is missing, you have to install the Microsoft Core Fonts package. If you are usig Debian, run apt-get install msttcorefonts (or apt-get install msttcorfonts for earlier distributions) as root. If you are using Gentoo, run emerge corefonts as root. For other Linux systems, visit the http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ home page for instructions. Restart your Mozilla after that. Now you should have the Arial font.

Don't select the ``Times'' and ``Helvetica'' fonts, because they are the Type 1 fonts which don't contain all the necessary Hungarian accented letters.