This page can help you determine if your computer has the fonts needed to display Chinese characters or Romanized Chinese. If it does —and these days that is a very high probability— then the following table should display correctly regardless of your encoding settings (See below.)
|
Ā Á Ă À
ā á ă à Ǖ Ǘ Ǚ Ǜ ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ |
The top two lines at the left should be A or a with diacritics to indicate Chinese tones. These letters are extensively used on the China-related pages of this web site.
The third and fourth lines should be the letter ü with the same diacritics. |
|
Ĉ ĉ
Ĝ ĝ
Ĥ ĥ Ĵ ĵ Ŝ ŝ Ŭ ŭ |
The letters at left should be the circumflexed letters of Esperanto. |
|
Я не говорю по-русски.
Αυτου οι θανατον μητσομαι |
The top line at left should be in Russian, the lower line in Greek. |
| 中 華 民 族
中 华 民 族 |
There should be eight Chinese characters at the left, the top row traditional (blue), the lower row simplified (red). |
If it all looks right, you can stop reading right here and return to your previous page.
You can subject your computer to a more comprehensive test including many other languages, at the multilingual site of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
What To Do If It All Looks Wrong
All of the non-Chinese characters shown above are available in recent versions of the "Times New Roman" type font (incorporating the "WGL4" Unicode subset of 652 characters), the Arial type font, and similar generic font that almost certainly came with your computer. Upgrades and instructions can be obtained from the web sites for Microsoft, Apple, and other software creators.
The Chinese chracters above require a full Unicode font covering the Chinese portion of the code tables. Examples are NSimSun, SimSun (or earlier MS Song) and PMingLiU (or earlier MingLiU), from Microsoft. These or equivalents are normally included already with your computer or with browser software. and should come up automatically unless you have disabled them or unless on your computer they need to be activated. (Different versions of Linux may vary in what they provide automatically.)
"Arial Unicode MS" is a(n ugly) font from Microsoft that is intended to contain all officially designated Unicode characters. It's use is not recommended when other fonts are available because the high and low characters of some scripts make others look double-spaced, but the intention is to have a fall-back when no other font works.
Even if you have the correct fonts available, you can still have "garbage characters" if you have set the page for the wrong "encoding." (The "encoding" convention tells the computer what underlying series of ones and zeroes should correspond with what letter, whether or not that letter is available on any of the resident type fonts.)
As I understand it, the user can overrule the page maker's choice of encodings. So can the pagemaker's server settings. However most users leave their browsers set to follow the page maker's instructions, if any. And both I and my server have the "encoding" set to"utf-8," which is the international standard for multilingual web pages.
Here is the same table again. It should look the same way it did before. If it does not, you should be able to correct the problem by changing your character encoding. (In Firefox, go to "View/Character Encoding/Unicode (UTF-8)"; in Internet Explorer, go to … well, I can't tell you because my copy of IE keeps crashing, but it is something pretty similar.)
If manually setting the encoding to UTF-8 works, then all you need to do is either make that the default or turn off any default. If there is still a problem, check the on-line help for your browser.
|
Ā Á Ă À
ā á ă à Ǖ Ǘ Ǚ Ǜ ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ |
The top two lines at the left should be A or a with diacritics to indicate Chinese tones. These letters are extensively used on the China-related pages of this web site.
The third and fourth lines should be the letter ü with the same diacritics. |
|
Ĉ ĉ
Ĝ ĝ
Ĥ ĥ Ĵ ĵ Ŝ ŝ Ŭ ŭ |
The letters at left should be the circumflexed letters of Esperanto. |
|
Я не говорю по-русски.
Αυτου οι θανατον μητσομαι |
The top line at left should be in Russian, the lower line in Greek. |
| 中 華 民 族
中 华 民 族 |
There should be eight Chinese characters at the left, the top row traditional (blue), the lower row simplified (red). |