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How to Display/Write Chinese with your Browser

A number of pages on this website uses Unicode Chinese characters. If you browser does not support Chinese characters, then you will see ? or □ or ¿ or some other funny characters instead. If you wish to be able to display Chinese characters or foreign characters then visit the links below and follow the instructions below.

	Sidetrack: I have writen a program called UnicodeViewer to display Unicode characters. Read & download UnicodeViewer here. This is a freeware and only 25k in size!

As long as you have the proper Chinese fonts installed, your browser will automatically display the Chinese characters without intervention. However, some websites have incorrectly coded html "charset" definition on their web pages, thus confusing your browser. If you have already installed Arial Unicode MS fonts and your browser does not display correctly, you have to then manually select the correct font via the IE menu -> View -> Fonts Encoding -> Ming Liu, MS Song, Big5, Simplified or Arial Unicode MS (or Thai, Hebrew, etc).

To test whether your browser properly supports Chinese Characters go visit www.mingpao.com and www.chinanews.com.cn

If you cannot see the Chinese characters, then try this first:

Microsoft Office CD / Win9x / Win2000 / WinXP

If you are lucky enough to own an Office95/97/2000 CD, then go to your CD folder: The following shows where you can find the required font files on the CD.

Office 97 CD
The Chinese fonts are located in folder \VALUPACK\FAREAST on the CD. The required files are CHSSUPP.EXE and CHTSUPP.EXE containing the simplified and traditional (Big5) fonts respectively. The other 2 files are Japanese and Korean fonts. You should install both since some websites uses traditional, while others use simplified characters.

Just double-click to execute the two EXE files above and the Chinese fonts will be installed.

Office XP & Office XP SP2 CD
OfficeXP has the Arial unicode fonts on the CD, but it is not installed by default. You have to manually copy it from the CD. The fonts files are located in folder \FILES\WINDOWS\FONTS. The Arial unicode file is ARIALUNI.TTF

Just copy the TTF file into your C:\WINDOWS\FONTS folder and that is all that is required. There is no installation required.

MS Download
Unfortunately Microsoft has disabled online downloads of the all MS font files including ARIALUNI.TTF. But there is an alternative. You can still download the IME or Global IME and you can still obtain Chinese fonts - though not Arial unicode. You have to search for IME or International support pages at MS site.

ARIALUNI.TTF Bugs
Somehow the Arial Unicode MS (download version 0.98) only contains approximately 51,180 characters glyphs and not 55,000 as claimed. The Unicode Consortium's standard is currently version 3.2 and has 90,000+ glyphs defined. The downloadable Arial Unicode MS v0.98 is far from complete and have many glyphs still missing - particularly KangXi radicals and Yi syllable, etc which are important but missing. In addition, there are many errors in the font hinting that causes characters to go out of alignment (width and height of many characters not correct). The file is approximately 22Mb in size and not 13.6Mb as indicated at the download site!

It has been brought to my knowledge that the ARIALUNI.TTF in Office XP SP2 ed is version 1.0 and may contain some fixes to missing and incorrect fonts only but not the font hinting problem. The original Arial Unicode font is no longer available for download.

If you still have problems, then visit the following sites which have in-depth information:-

Unicode & Multilingual Support - Alan Wood's Unicode Resources. This is an excellent site. Here you will find links to many other sites containing information on Unicode and where to get the Unicode fonts.

Publishing in Chinese on the Web

For web based publishing, I do not suggest using Chinese word processing software as they have proprietary encoding on their fonts and some translations between Big5 and Simplified characters are incorrect (bugs). Different versions of the same software have different font encodings thereby making your documents incompatible even across different versions of the same software! For internal or private use, you can use whatever software you so wish.

Generally, readers will be unable to read your documents if you use such software to create documents / HTML pages unless they also have the same Chinese software and fonts on their PC. Only by installing the software can you gain access to the proprietary fonts.

However, you may overcome this if you limit you Chinese word processing software to use only standard fonts such as MS Song, MS Hei and Unicode fonts so that your audience can read your web pages with standard Netscape, Opera or IE. This only applies if you intend to publish for the world wide audience.

Unicode supports all the major different world languages including Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. Documents created using Unicode fonts can be read by anyone as long as he has Unicode fonts installed - and that is readily available at no charge. If you want true universality, use Unicode fonts. The present Arial Unicode MS font file contains no less than 51,000 universal alphabets (Chinese, Greek, Thai, Hebrew, Russian, Korean, Japanese, mathematical, line drawing, etc).

Unfortunately, Unicode font has its disadvantages (at least for the present). There is only one free Arial Unicode MS font with straight typeface. Other typefaces (script, bold, italic, etc) are not readily available, or only available commercially. There is a Unicode Consortium (non profit organization) www.unicode.org which coordinates the development / improvements to the Unicode specifications. There is no fonts available for download there. We expect more Unicode typefaces to be readily available with standard OS in future.

There is also a free utility called Input Method Editor (IME) which allows you to write in various languages on your Windows PC. You may download it from Microsoft. It is sometimes called Global IME or Global Input Method Editor by MS. This utility has a virtual keyboard that will allow you to enter most languages (Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Thai, etc) into your word processing, spreadsheet, etc. It uses Arial Unicode MS font. The IME tool is very similar to the virtual keyboard in various common Chinese word processing software. I understand you can still download the IME files which contains the MS Hei and MS Song fonts. But ARIALUNI.TTF is not included.

You may also wish to explore Linux open source sites and search for Unicode fonts. Ghostscript (Open Source Postscript file viewer) have a number of international fonts that may be usable.

Also do visit the FreeType consortium. www.freetype.org which has free/GPL software which allows you to display beautiful fonts.

You can download and use Linux font files as long as they are True Type compatible.

I have also written a program to enable you to view ALL Unicode characters from selected font files (MS Hei, MS Song, Ming Liu, MS Arial Unicode). You can get it here: Download UnicodeViewer