How to Display Chinese Characters

For Windows XP users:
1. Open your Control Panel, select “Regional and Language Options”. Go to the “Languages” tab; under “Supplemental Language Support”, select “Install Files for Asian Languages,” Then “OK”, “OK”. Wait for the files to install, then restart your computer.
2. Return to “Regional and Language Options” and the “Languages” tab. Under “Text Services & Input Languages”, “Installed Services”, select Add.
In “Add Input Language” dialog, choose “Input Language”, “Chinese, PRC,” “OK”.
For Windows 2000 users:
1. Open Windows Start menu > Settings > Control Panel.
2. Select the Regional Options icon.
3. On the General tab under “Language settings for the system,” click Simplified Chinese, and then click Add (if there is such a button). When you click OK, your computer may demand the Windows 2000 or Office 2000 CD-ROM so that it can copy font files to your hard disk.
4. Click “Input Locales.” Click the “Add” button and, under “Input Locale,” choose “Chinese (PRC).”
5. Under “Keyboard Layout” choose “MS Pinyin”. In the lower part of the dialog, you can set “Switch between Input Locales” to either control-shift or alt-shift. “Switch to English” can be left at “none,”.
6. Be sure to choose the “Enable indicator on taskbar” box.
For Mac users:
1. Open ‘System Preferences’>’International’>’Input Menu’
2. Turn on ‘Simplified Chinese’ and/or ‘Traditional Chinese.’
3. Make sure ‘Show Input Menu in Menu Bar’ is checked.
4. Close the ‘System Preference’ window.
5. Go to the ‘Input Menu’ (if you are using a US system, it should be a US flag icon) and select Simplified Chinese and/or Traditional Chinese.
6. Click on the ‘Input Menu’ again, you should see a list of 8 input methods at the bottom half of the pull down menu. You should choose Pinyin unless you are more comfortable with another system.
PDFs - If you can not see the Chinese characters in your PDF Lesson Plan file, your adobe acrobat reader should automatically detect that you need to download Chinese scripts. First wait a moment for the program to detect this.
FireFox Version 2 and above
Try this first -
View > Character Encoding > Auto-Detect > Chinese
View > Character Encoding > More Encodings > East Asian >
Choose one or all of these:
Chinese Simplified - GB2312, GBK, GB18030, HZ, ISO-2022-CN
Chinese Traditional - Big5, Big5-HKSCS, EUC-TW
Internet Explorer Version 7 and above
Right Click > Encoding or go to
View > Encoding > Auto-Select (for the best solution) if not then
Chinese Simplified (HZ)
Unicode (UTF-8)
View > Encoding > More >
Chinese Simplified (GB18030)
Chinese Simplified (GB2312)
Chinese Traditional (Big5)
Konqueror Version 3.1.2
View > Set Encoding >
Choose: for
Simplified Chinese one or all of these - GBK, GB18030, HZ-GB2312
Traditional Chinese one or all of these - Big5, utf8 (Unicode)
Netscape
Opera Version 8 and above
View > Encoding > Chinese > Automatic detection or
Choose for:
Traditional Chinese one or all of these - Big5, Big5-HKSCS , EUC-TW
Simplified Chinese one or all of these - GBK/GB2312, GB18030, HZ-GB2312, ISO-2022-CN
After all this and you still can not see Chinese then you might need to up-grade to the latest Browsers, install some Chinese Fonts or install the supporting Language Packs into your operating system.
Please Note:
The three most common encoding's for viewing Chinese characters are Big5, GB2312 and UTF-8 (try these 3 first). If the Chinese characters aren't displayed the way they should (if some characters have "?" or "#" or other symbols), then try adding more encoding's. GB is the most popular encoding for Simplified Chinese Characters with the Big5 encoding most popular for Traditional Chinese Characters.