Help with viewing Old English or other special characters

All material on the Old English Newsletter website is encoded in UTF-8 format for Unicode fonts (see http://www.unicode.org/ for more information on Unicode). Most modern browsers should be able to detect this automatically, locate an appropriate font in your system, and display all characters without trouble, though admittedly some browsers will do it more attractively than others.

If the following lines of Old English verse display legibly, you should have no trouble with any texts on this site:

Hwæt wē gār-dena       in gēardagum
þēodcyninga       þrym gefrūnon,
hū ðā æþelingas       ellen fremedon.

If these lines are not legible—if you see question marks or square boxes where thorns, eths and long vowels should be—you should install a Unicode-friendly font specially designed for medieval texts, such as Peter Baker's Junicode (http://junicode.sourceforge.net/). If the problem persists, please consider upgrading your web browser to a more standards-compliant version (such as Mozilla or Apple’s Safari).

You may also read OEN essays in .pdf format; for this you will need Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader, available from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html.

If you continue to have trouble seeing special characters in essays or reports, or for any other technical problems using this site, please contact the editor at editor@oenewsletter.org.