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SAULCAT - St Andrews University Library Catalogue

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You are here: Library >Finding information >Library catalogues >SAULCAT >Viewing non-Roman (Unicode) Scripts

Viewing non-Roman (Unicode) scripts

Catalogue records in SAULCAT for languages such as Farsi (Persian), Russian (Cyrillic) and Arabic are transliterated (Romanized).

In 2007 some catalogue records started to have the original script added to the records although the main text is still transliterated. Users can now view this original script in certain records; these use the Unicode (UTF-8) font encoding.

Examples

Examples of what you can expect to see in SAULCAT are:

Cyrillic script

Example of Cyrillic Unicode script

Cyrillic script record example

Farsi script

Example of Farsi Unicode script

Farsi script record example

Transliteration tables

The transliteration tables for the most common Non-Roman scripts can be found at on the Library of Congress website at www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html.

What is Unicode encoding?

Unicode is a standard way of allowing computers to consistently represent text; it's like a 'universal alphabet'.

"Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language." (www.unicode.org)

Operating system support for Unicode

All modern operating systems support Unicode, including Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista; Macintosh OS X 10.2 onwards; and Linux/Unix. Generally speaking, the newer the version the better the Unicode support.

Unicode fonts

In order to view a Unicode document, a computer must have a font installed which includes characters for the scripts used in the documents. In modern operating systems these are already preinstalled, such as Arial Unicode MS (Windows) and Lucida Unicode (Macintosh).

Browser settings

You shouldn't have any trouble viewing Unicode in any modern browsers, such as Internet Explorer 6 or 7, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape 7+, Opera 7+ or Safari. However, if you do have any difficulties in viewing the original script or any difficulties in viewing the diacritic characters in both Roman and non-Roman character sets then you may need to configure your web browser.

Check that your browser encoding is set to Unicode (UTF-8).

Internet Explorer

  1. Go to View > Encoding
  2. Make sure that Auto-Select is selected (has a tick)
  3. If necessary, select Unicode (UTF-8)

For more instructions see Configuring Internet Explorer 5 and 6 or Configuring Internet Explorer 7.

Mozilla Firefox

  1. Go to View > Character Encoding
  2. Select Unicode (UTF-8) -- it may be listed under More encodings > Unicode

For more instructions see Configuring Firefox.

Safari

  1. Go to View > Text Encoding
  2. Select Unicode (UTF-8)

For more instructions see Configuring Safari.