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About international characters and symbols on Web pages

When you create Web pages, international characters— such as ä (the letter a with an umlaut) and é (the letter e with an acute accent) and characters from languages such as Russian and Japanese— are preserved by default.

Web pages are stored in HTML in the text-encoding standard that matches your language version of Microsoft Windows. If the character isn't included in that text-encoding standard, it is stored as either a named character entity from the HTML standard or a numeric character reference representing the Unicode value of the character.

Symbols that you insert by using the Symbol command on the Insert menu are preserved when you use the correct symbol font. If you author Web pages in more than one language, first set up your system to handle multilingual text, and consider changing the encoding of your Web pages to match the language you want to use.