I can't see the chinese characters in my browser for this web page

[Duney]

I have the english version of Windows XP on my computer. I have my computer setup to display east asian fonts. Under the 'Advanced' tab of the language bar settings, I have the box checked to 'Extend support of advanced text services to all programs'.

Under the Control Panel/Regional and Language Options, i have the language selected as 'Chinese (PRC)'. several things checked under the Code Page Conversion Tables.

However, when I try to view this web page,

http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/cgi-bin/agrep-lindict?query=%a4%55&category=wholerecord

I only see '?????' where there should be Chinese characters.

I have seen this on other web sites as well in addition to some chinese programs I have installed.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

[skylee]

The page is in traditional Chinese (i.e. the characters used in Taiwan/Hong Kong not PRC). Could you turn the coding/character set to Big5 or traditional Chinese under "View" at your browser?

[roddy]

That's what I had to do. The HTML doesn't specify it is BIG5 encoding, and my browser guessed (wrongly) that it was GB18030, and everything was mangled.

On Firefox

View > Character Encoding > More > East Asian > Chinese Traditional (Big 5)

On IE

View > Encoding > Other > Chinese Traditional (Big 5)

[Duney]

This worked. Great! I didn't know about doing this so that will help on other web sites as well. Is there any way to specify a particular setting for a particular website, or do I need to change the encoding manually each time?

[roddy]

The website should tell the browser what encoding to use with a line like this

but they don't always get it right. In those cases you can try and manually change it to try and get it to work - GB2312 (simplified), UTF-8 (everything), BIG5(traditional) and GB18030 (simplified) are the most commonly used encodings for Chinese characters, so if it's not working you can try running through those manually. Crossing your fingers doesn't hurt.

Roddy