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Unicode support in Opera

Unicode is a technology that allows software to display characters from many of the world's languages in the same document. With Unicode, it is possible to write Russian, Polish, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, and Chinese all in the same web page or document.

Opera fully supports Unicode. Since version 7.20, Opera also supports bi-directional text (BiDi), which is needed for sites written in the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets. However, you may still have some problems with specific languages or web pages.

If you see empty rectangles instead of the characters you expect, it usually means that your system does not have the proper fonts installed. Try downloading a Unicode font that includes the range of characters you need:

  • Unicode fonts for Windows computers
    Despite the name of the page, these fonts can be used on any system that supports TrueType and OpenType fonts, including the Mac and most modern Linux and Unix systems.

If you see characters that are complete gibberish instead of what you expect, it means that there is a mismatch between the character set that the server sends, and what Opera expects. If this happens, you can try the following:

  • Choose View > Encoding > Automatic selection. This will display the web page in the encoding that the web server has specified.
  • If that does not work, and you know which encoding the web page should have, you can choose it from the menu in View > Encoding. If you only have a rough idea of which encoding the web page has, you can try several.
  • If the web server specifies the wrong character set (for example, the web server claims that it is written in UTF-8, but the page does not look right until you manually select ISO-8859-1), you may want to contact the publisher of the web page.

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