Chinese characters display as question marks.

[percy1981]

Hiya guys,

I have written an XHTML page and defined the charset for the page like so.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=big5" />

I have copied chinese characters from a word document and pasted them into the XHTML document. The problem is when I preview the XHTML page in the browser, some of the chinese characters render as question marks. They also display as question marks in the XHTML editor(DW8).

I have tried:

1. Changing the charset to UTF-8.
2. Messing around with the browser settings (FF/IE)
3. Reading about encoding only to be baffled further.
4. Installing language packs on windows.

Any ideas?


Ta!

 

[percy1981]

Okay, so I changed the charset to UTF-8, which is supposed to cover more languages and support mulitlingual documents. But the characters are rendering like this now:

?

Any ideas?

 

[monksnake]

What is the encoding on the browser setting itself??

In IE6 it's under the view -> encoding menu.

<.

 

[percy1981]

In IE6 the browser is set to UTF-8 and the charset is set to UFT-8 in the XHTML.

I also swapped this to big5 in the browser and the XHTML document. I think I need UTF-8 though because there is english in the same page.

Firefox is set to UTF-8 also.

 

[feherke]

Hi

What if all was compromised when you "copied chinese characters from a word document" ? I would try to get some Chinese test text from other source.

Feherke.

http://rootshell.be/~feherke/

 

[percy1981]

Ah, I never thought of that. I will give it a go!

 

[monksnake]

Since you are able to view other chinese characters, I believe the charset doesn't support those characters that become '?'.

Since UTF-8 shows them as '?', I'm curious as to whether or not they are legitimate characters for translation.





<.

 

[monksnake]

I found this page, it may help you, I'm looking through it as well.

http://www.khngai.com/chinese/charmap/

<.

 

[percy1981]

By Jove, Feherke hit the nail on the head!

I have typed some random english sentances into an English to Chinese Translator and copied the translation into the XHTML. So far everything I have copied is fine and displays as I would expect!

Cheers for your help guys! I am interested to know what word did to the Chinese though...

 

[xwb]

There are two chinese fonts: big5 for traditional and GB2312 for simplified.

In case you didn't know, simplified is to traditional is like text messaging is to normal spelling. The number of words is the same; the way some words are written is different (gr8 and great). Many of the words still remain the same.

Word cheats: it it can't find an ideograph in traditional, it changes font and looks in simplified. You will only notice this if you go character by character - there will be a font change. If you copy stuff from Word, you may notice font changes all over the place.

You could always cover every possibility by using Arial MS Unicode as the base font. It has both simplified and traditional fonts.