User guide:
How to read Sámi on the Internet with a PC

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To read Sámi on the Internet you have to:

  • Get the new Sámi standard (Latin 9).
    If you already have a Sámi font, (from Vplan or JL-Types for instance), they will give you a free upgrade from the old standard to the new one. If you don't already have Sámi fonts you can either purchase them (making sure that what you buy follows Latin 9 -- make sure!!), or you can get some free Everson Mono font from Michael Everson.

  • Install the font on your computer.
    If you already have a Latin 9 font installed you can skip this step.
    If you have downloaded the fonts you can install them in Windows this way:
    What you download is two font files and a compression program called PKUNZIP. Open the font files by dragging them onto PKUNZIP and save them to a directory. Install the fonts with the Fonts utility Control Panel in the Main group.

  • Install the font in your Web browser.
    If you have Netscape 2.0, open the menu "Options", then "General Preferences", and then "Fonts". There you should choose "User-Defined" "For the Encoding", and the Latin 9 fonts via "Use the Proportional Font" and "Use the Fixed Font". If you have several fonts choose a monowidth font (a typewriter-like font (such as Mono or Everson Mono Latin 9) as your "Fixed Font" and a variable-width font (such as Deatnu or Thomas Latin 9 as your "Proportional Font"). If you only have one Sámi font choose it for both options.. When the text is read you pass over the "Options" menu, open "Document Encoding", and select "User-Defined". If you don't want to read Sámi pages you can keep "Document Encoding" set to "Latin 1" (note that all the languages which can be read in Latin 1 can also be read with the Sámi Latin 9 fonts!). If you have a Web browser other than Netscape you do the same things with it; the point is that you should set the default fonts to Sámi fonts.

  • Find a Sámi text written in Latin-9 and check that everything works.
    A number of pages in Sámi (Latin-9) can be found at the Barentssekretariat homepage. Some other test pages can be found at sami-teastabaiki.html

    To upload Sámi text to the Internet you have to:

  • Write your file in HTML-format (Internet format) with a Sámi (Latin 9) font, and then upload it in the usual way. Make sure of two things:
    1. Most conversion programs, like "rtf2html" are not configured to recognize Sámi letters, so you will have to make corrections manually (you avoid this problem you if you write the file directly as HTML-text).
    2. If you depend on sending a file from one machine to another to get it onto the net it can happen that the e-mail program corrupts the Sámi letters. Choose an option like "No translation", "Raw data transmission" or the like to prevent over-smart e-mail programs from interfering.

    If you have problems, contact one of us.
    Write to Trond Trosterud, Barentssekretariat (or ring him at +47 7899-3758), or to Roy Amundsen, EDB-consultant to the Sámi Parliament, or to Michael Everson, Everson Gunn Teoranta.

    Back to the Sámi encoding test page
    Michael Everson, Evertype, Dublin, 2001-09-21