Solving the symbols: How to get rid of Cyrillic characters from displaying in html files

Anyone who has posted converted Word Documents to html for web usage may have come across the issue of the online version becoming littered with mysterious symbols. Symbols where apostrophes once were are no more, causing the content to become aesthetically unpleasant and far less legible.

To understand in general terms why this occurs, it is related to the way in which your document was encoded and subsequently how web browsers display that content in bits or binary data. What may not be commonly known is the exsistence of a worldwide coding standard for the representation of text for computer display, called Unicode, where each character is assigned a unique number regardless of platform version (i.e. PC or Mac), language or program being utilized. In addition, the Unicode Standard also includes 3 different encoding forms, which enables the data to be transmitted into bytes and rendered as readable content on the web.

One encoding form known as Unicode UTF8 (Unicode transformation format) is widely popular for html conversion. Unicode UTF8 is widely supported in browsers and is also considered to be “backwards compatible,” in that it can communicate with older web programming standards.

So the question remains: "How do I ensure my class material is displayed properly online for my students"? The answer does somewhat depend on your starting point, so I will cover two most likely scenarios as follows:

1. If you have uploaded your html files into eClass (WebCT), within the File Manager, click the action arrow next to the document you would like to convert, and select “Declare Character Set” from the drop down menu and choose Unicode UTF8. Click Save.
   
2. If you are saving your document from Microsoft Word and select File> Save as Web Page, before converting your document, select Web Options > Encoding, and scroll down to Unicode (UTF8) and check “Always save Web Pages in the default encoding”