Chinese Fonts

I just recently picked up my new IBM T60p. I currently live and work in China so frequently use Chinese websites.

I can view almost all the Chinese characters that come up on the screen but sometimes some will appear as little squares.

Now today I went to download the online stock market watch program to watch my stocks but the site is almost completely unreadable. Half of it comes through fine but the other half is squares and zeros with lines through them and so on.

I tried going to "view" then "encoding" and switching to the other chinese ones available but they make it worse. The automatic one is the best but not nearly good enough.

Can somebody point me in the right direction to fixing this problem please.

My OS is windows xp with office basic.

Thanks

 

u should be able to add more language supports within control panel->regional & language options->keyboard and language

cheers ...

 

yup. let me add on to qhn's post. btw, it's Control Panel, Regional & languages options, Languages. tab.

at the languages dialog, select the second tab, and tick the second checkbox marked "Install files for East Asian languages". (I'm not sure if it requires a reboot, but if it ask to reboot, reboot).

Next head back to the languages tab. At the top section marked "Text Services and input languages, click details. The next dialog box will appear, and in it, under installed services, click add Chinese (PRC) (leave the keyboard default). Yup. There you have, Chinese language support!

 

NJ Star Communicator (free download) will also allow you to read Chinese fonts http://www.njstar.com/, it also supports Japanese and Korean text.

 

not only that. if a program is written in GB/big5, instead of utf8, you will not see the chinese on your pc, this because by default, your pc is in english and think that the non utf8 is actually english text. you must open the regional setting and in the advanced tab, select to display the non utf8 to be "chinese"

 

It normally asks you for your OS CD from which to the copy the new language files from.

I did it on Win XP that way since I wanted to view Japanese text without seeing little squares even though I cant read it.

 

In addition to the regional and languages option, you may also need to go to you internet options\languages\add "all the languages you want to display" for IE.
For Firefox goto Tools\options\advanced\languages\choose "the languages you want to display."
And there is also some language options in MS office if you want to read and use other languages in email correspondence.
Yea, I have been living northwest China for the last 6-7 years.

 

Usually with mine, I just open a website with Chinese and IE usually comes up with a message telling me to download the language.

 

If he can view Chinese already and only sometimes characters show up as random symbols. It means those characters are missing from the current encoding scheme. Most likely because it is using a different encoding scheme than the one your viewing with. You really just got to flip through it sometimes, however, if you mean by some characters not showing up, are you referring to the Hong Kong Supplementary Character set?

 

There are two basic sets of Chinese characters, complicated (which are also called traditional) and simplified. Mainland China uses simplified characters, came about after China became "The People's Republic of China" to help promote education. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and, for the most part, Chinese in Singapore and many abroad still use the tradition complex characters. Some of the characters from both sets are the same but most are now different and some variances of meaning will differ from place to place just like the English language differs from one Western country to another. And Japanese also use some Chinese characters in their written language. So wherever the web site you want to view originated from is the language you need to have added to your browser or installed on your OS in order to view all the characters. This issue really isn't a font issue, although there are various fonts, but as iOiris has stated, is one of adding all the appropriate language sets. Hope that helps.

 

WOW! This is why I really like this site. I still never expect to get so many responses to my inquiries.

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you all as I have been travelling and am now in Hong Kong at the Electronics Fair here.

Basically I took the first posts advice and went to the control box. I ended up fiddling with it for awhile before hitting on the right buttons to achieve what i needed.

What I did was go to control panel then regional languages. From there I installed the East asian languages program. OI thought this would work but it only got rid of some of the squigglies but not all. So I went back to the regianol languages to see what else I could mess with. I went into the advance part and changed the language for non unicode programs to the Chinese PRC one. Well this did the trick. No more squares and squiglies.

Thank you very much guys I really appreciate all the responses.

I have an amazing laptop but no knowledge of how to really use the thing so i have a lot of learning to go. I will be back with many questions for you all.

In an hour i am heading out to the electronic shops to buy myself a new webcam and headphones. Need to figure out this bluetooth thing next.

Thanks again everybody.

Joe

 

OK, so now I am running into another problem. My fix as stated in the post above now allows me to use my real time Chinese stock site but has created another problem. Some of my previously english programs have turned Chinese on me. For example my Picaso turned Chinese. Now this was easy to fix by going directly into it and changing the language back to English manually.

However, I just bought and installed a new Logitech web cam and it is now coming up all in Chinese (the install program that is and the updates, reminders, etc...). This is happening with other programs as well that I cannot so easily, in fact not at all, find a way to switch back to English.

This is not what I want obviuosly. I want all programs to be english except the ones that are supposed to be chinese.

How can I prevent this from happening and yet still be able to access the Chinese sites in Chinese when I need them??

 

I am no IT expert but living in China there are a few things I have discovered and others can chime in with more expertise on the subject, when installing devices bought in China I first hit the internet and find the English-based drivers for them (if available) and use the English drivers with the device instead of the Chinese ones on the install disk or I have used dual-boot systems with a Chinese and English OS on the same computer and only install Chinese drivers on a Chinese-based OS and only install English drivers on my English-based copy of WinXP. And when I got other computers then I always kept one with a Chinese copy of windows installed. Because every time I did what you did and mixed the two I always had various problems. On Vista Ultimate I think you can have different Languages installed for different users on the same boot up, i.e. logon one user using English OS and another in Chinese (if you have installed the language from Windows updates). But again I haven't tried this yet and I am no expert. Good luck though.

 

Thanks T4House. Previously i did just that with having one system in Chinese and one in English. The problem was (on that computer at least maybe I just don't know another way to do it) that you had to log of the one to get into the other. Well i need my real time stock charts up running all the time while I work on my english OS.

By the way i bought this in the states so everything came preloaded with english. I have downloaded Chinese fonts and changed the language for stuff in the control panel.

Like I mentioned the problem is I go to call up something, like for instance just now wanted to do PC Doctor and it came up in Chinese even though it was preloaded in the states in english.

So what I want is just the programs i down load in Chinese to be Chinese and to be able to see Chinese in my emails but not have it come up for all my other programs such as PC Doctor and others.

I am by far no expert or even any good at this so i don't even know where to begin.

Unfortunately where i am nobody of any use to help me either. Must figure it out and do it myself or wait till the next time I am back in Canada.