Re: Encoding Issue for .ly Files on CPDL

It looks like this site : https://victoria.uma.es, display .ly files correctly (that is, 
Unicode encoding).

It probably means that vitoria.uma.es is correctly set for but not the site 
https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/in

Actually, these settings are at the level of the Apache server and/or on an .htaccess file 
at the root of the website, so that when CPDL displays files stored on victoria.uma.es 
website, they will be displayed according to the settings of victoria.uma.es, not those of 
cdpl...


Le 06.06.26 à 17:41, David Wright a écrit :
> On Tue 02 Jun 2026 at 09:10:00 (-0400), Gabriel Ellsworth wrote:
>> Recently I have noticed an issue with how .ly files display in my browser
>> when I view the LilyPond work that other editors kindly share on CPDL.
>>
>> I have documented the issue, with links to several examples, in the CPDL
>> Forums:
>>
>> Unicode encoding issue for LilyPond engraving files (.ly)
>> <https://forums.cpdl.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=14145>
> Like you, I see LP files displayed on the screen as Windows-1252.
> (Normally, I SaveToFile, which works correctly (utf-8), and
> in the past would download by pasting the link into the
> commandline, nowadays scuppered by the bots/permissions/etc.)
>
>> The forum moderator wrote:
>>
>>> processors like LilyPond and Frescobaldi show diacritics and … browsers
>>> don’t show them.
> I think the most significant line in that conversation might be:
>    "Just (left)clicking on the link is NOT ever correct."
> which sounds like a typical computing rationalisation of:
>    "It's never worked for me so it must be the wrong thing to do."
>
>> But this is incorrect, IIUC. As I mentioned in the forum, there is no
>> problem with diacritics when I view in my browser the excellent work of
>> Nancho Álvarez:
>> https://victoria.uma.es/guerrero/ly/Guerrero-Adios_Verde_Ribera.ly.
> Perhaps they were able to enforce only utf-8 files from the start.
>
> I use FireFox (preferred) and Chromium on Debian linux. In both,
> saving from the screen display places the correct contents into
> the file. (Cut and Paste will copy the incorrect characters.)
>
> FireFox does appear to know what the correct encoding is, as it
> provides an easy way to correct the screen display:
>    View > Repair Text Encoding        as easy as <Alt> V C
> (I've read that this option is greyed out if FF doesn't know what
> the correct encoding is. I'm also told that you can make this into
> a button on the toolbar, but I prefer using the keyboard.)
>
> I don't know the equivalent command in Chromium, which I only use
> for financial sites that refuse FF.)
>
>> I believe that CPDL should be able to display files in UTF-8 within
>> browsers. But I know almost nothing about either Unicode or websites.
> Neither do most people. AIUI, browsers could easily fix this, and some
> used to automatically, but they feel they have to pander to the small
> population of users who still use computers with what they call the
> "ANSI" standard, whereas the vast majority of web pages are now served
> up as UTF-8. There's also a (hopefully) diminishing population of web
> servers with legacy iso-8859 pages, but charset=utf-8 set site-wide.¹
>
>> My questions for this list:
>>
>>
>>     1. By any chance, can anyone figure out *why* CPDL currently can’t
>>     display diacritics correctly?
> Because browsers take it upon themselves to guess, and they guess
> wrongly. (Posh name: heuristics.)
>    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charset_detection
>
>>     2. What would be required to fix/improve CPDL?
> Like others here, I assume that adding charset=utf-8 would fix it.
> (We can observe that it gets text/plain correct.) The question then
> becomes: are there ancient text files that are not encoded in utf-8?²
> Strictly, the charset should be set file-by-file if that's the case;
> quite a task.
>
> I've read that one can still set a default charset in FF, but also
> that it only applies to local files, opened asfile:///… . Not
> something I've tried, as my own systems are utf-8 throughout.
>
> ¹ It might be worth pointing out that our troubles are small: it's
>    easy to read much of a utf-8 page wrongly encoded as iso-8859 and
>    see what the problem is. Even the inverse is not too troubling.
>    But a non-latin page served incorrectly as being in utf-8 becomes
>    gobbledygook. Have a chuckle reading this related problem:
>      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts
>
> ² CPDL goes back to 1998: Debian switched its default encoding for
>    new installations to utf-8 in 2007.
>
> Cheers,
> David.
>

-- 
Silvain Dupertuis
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