Asian Characters in HTML Drop Down Menus

Posted: November 24, 2008

Including asian characters in drop down menus on websites can be a bit trickier than they seem and requires a step further than just including the Meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=utf-8" />

If you are using language characters in a drop down menu, testing in a IE6 and IE7 will display square boxes instead of the desired characters. This is because Microsoft browsers cannot render the special characters within standard fonts correctly. To fix this problem, the drop down SELECT needs to be set to the font Arial Unicode MS.

<select style="font-family: Arial Unicode MS">
<option value="Chinese">...</option>
<option value="Japanese">...</option>
</select>

Tags: asian characters, drop down, encode, html, language, menu, squares
Posted in Code