Displaying foreign language characters on webpages?

Question

Whenever I'm looking at a web page that is supposed to show characters from another language, Japanese kanji for example, the characters come up as a bunch of '?'s, question marks.

I don't exactly speak Japanese but I am curious about a lot of unexplained kanji characters I know and I'm eager to learn a bit about it.

Does anyone know anything I can do to make my computer display the actual characters rather than a bunch of question marks?

Answer 1

Have you installed the language pack for you computer operated

system?

If your not XP professional then you might have to download the language pack or try going to view above the address bar or the browsing bar at the top, click on view and then encoding and then more and you will find japanese on there, click on either of them, do not ever click on auto select because the computer will never be able to recognise the language.

Answer 2

Most web browser will display text in the fonts chosen by the creator of the web page. If you don’t have those fonts, the browser will substitute.

The above is an over-simplification. But if you don’t have any font with kanji characters in, then you will only get a ? or a blank box for each of those characters.

My understanding is that Mozillia Firefox is better at finding characters in other fonts than Microsoft Internet Exporer, which tends to want the character to be in the Arial Unicode font, which you may not have.

In any case you can download the Code 2000 series of fonts from http://www.code2000.net/ . These cover almost all characters in the current version of Unicode.

Also, try some of the fonts listed at http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.ht... . Most of these are free, and you can download fonts that cover any language you particularly want to see the characters of, in your case, Japanese. You can also test by language on that site, and see if you already have characters that match the characters in a particular language. See http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/#links .

Answer 3

Depends on your browser, and whether you have the language packs installed for your computer or not, you can get the language packs from the microsoft website if you use a windows OS

Firefox:

go to the View tab, find the option Language, select desired language from the menu.

Explorer:

go to the View tab, find the option Unicode or Code or Language or something of the likes, select desired language. (You can tell I don't use IE)

you sometimes have to mess around with the selections, for example, there are several displays for Japanese, the most common being Shift_JIS, and the most common traditional chinese (the only) would be Big_5