Template file has different charset

[David]

A couple of people have asked what this message means.

Template file has different charset
The existing template file in the output folder does not use the same encoding or character set specified.

Different spoken languages have different character sets. A character set specifies the way that binary numbers are converted to letters in the alphabet. There are hundreds of different chracter sets in use. Here are a few,

Afrikaans (af) iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Albanian (sq) iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Arabic (ar) iso-8859-6
Bulgarian (bg) iso-8859-5
Czech (cs) iso-8859-2
Danish (da) iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Dutch (nl) iso-8859-1, windows-1252
English (en) iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Esperanto (eo) iso-8859-3
Estonian (et) iso-8859-15
Faroese (fo) iso-8859-1, windows-1252
Finnish (fi) iso-8859-1, windows-1252
French (fr) iso-8859-1, windows-1252
etc...

Every web page should specify which character set it uses to ensure the page displays correctly. This is done with meta data, for example,

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

So you need to make sure the search_template.html you use with Zoom is using a good character set. The character set in search_template.html must match the character set selected in Zoom (from the languages tab in the configuration window) and should also match the character set in use on your web pages.

If for example, you index your site using a Russian character set but display the result using a French character set the results are going to look all mixed up (lots of garbage chracters).

The above error message can happen if you create your initial search_template.html file with character set 'A' then later on switch to 'B' without fixing your template. Zoom doesn't update this automatically in your template becuase you might have already customised your search_template.html file and we don't want to overwrite your customised file.

There is also more information about International language support here,
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/languages.html

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David

[webby]

We are currently converting our site, language by language to UTF-8, however when we convert the zoomindexer files we are getting this error even though we have converted the template file, including the meta language settings

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

What have we missed?

[Ray]

You need to change the setting in the Configuration window, under the "Languages" tab. Select "Use Unicode (UTF-8 encoding)". You will need to re-index for this to take effect (and you should probably save your configuration for future indexing).

If you are using spider mode, you might also want to make sure you are not indexing from the cached copy of the web pages (which may have been cached from before you changed the encoding). You can do this from the "General" tab and checking "Reload all files (do not use cache)".