Question

I am currently working on a site which has some pages displaying Chinese characters. These display fine on Firefox however on IE I receive a simple box where the character should be.

I thought this was simply because I did not have the language pack installed onto Windows, but then I was provided some samples of it working.

Can someone please explain why this page displays properly for me in IE

http://www.ifc.org/chinese

But this does not?:

http://www.jjl.cn/

(Google.cn does not display correctly either)

I have tried

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=gb2312">

But have had no luck.

Thanks

Answer 1

It has nothing to do with the encoding, both sites work fine on my browser. It is because you do not have the proper language fonts installed on your computer.

I typically install these fonts upon install, so don’t recall that exact installation process. But you can likely find out how by going to Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options. If you still can’t figure it out check out this wiki link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Multilingual_support_(East_Asian)

note Keep in mind that input methods(used for typing the languages) are different than character fonts(used for displaying the languages).

note 2I typically use UTF-8 as the charset for all my pages, especially if I know I will be dealing with multilingual content.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

Here is how I tell what my problem is when dealing with characters not displaying correctly:

1. If you see a bunch of squares, it is your computer, and you need to install the appropriate font files.
2. If you see a bunch of random ASCII characters, then it is likely that the page encoding is incorrect. In which you can change which encoding to render the page in via browser settings as a temp fix
3. Very Unlikely Somebody is playing a mean joke and wrote a page using random ASCII characters/squares just to annoy users. 🙂