Reading Simplified Chinese on the Internet

Question on viewing Simplified Chinese:

Some users ask the question of why they cannot view Simplified Chinese characters under Traditional Chinese Windows 95/98 (TC-Windows), even with RichWin installed.  For example, the Simplified Chinese characters appear as tiny rectangles in the browser window.

Answer:

TC-Windows uses a font of Chinese characters encoded in the Big5 encoding scheme to display the set of Chinese characters whereas the Simplified Chinese character set is encoded in the GB encoding scheme.

Even though RichWin can support:

  1. input of Traditional or Simplified Chinese,
  2. encoding of Traditional or Simplified Chinese in either Big5 or GB character encoding scheme, and
  3. output of Traditional or Simplified Chinese in either Big5 or GB codes to be displayed,
the default installed Chinese fonts under TC-Windows is referenced by Big5 codes.

Therefore, if you are using the TC-Windows, you are still unable to view Simplified Chinese characters properly even if your browser has been explicitly set to view Simplified Chinese (GB) because the underlying TC-Windows is still using the default TC-Windows fonts.

To view both Traditional & Simplified Chinese web pages under the same Windows environment, we can use one of the following two methods:

(I) Use RichWin with English Windows 95/98. (Use of other Chinese add-on software, e.g. NJStar, should also work.)

(II) Use English Windows 95/98 or TC-Windows; then

    1. install the Microsoft Traditional & Simplified Chinese fonts and input method engines (described in Section (A) below); and
    2. set the browser (MSIE 5 or Netscape 4) to use either the Traditional or Simplified Chinese character encoding schemes when viewing Traditional or Simplified Chinese web page accordingly (described in Section (B) and Section (C) below).


    Moreover, if you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer v5 (MSIE 5) or later versions, then after you have done step (1) above, input of Traditional or Simplified Chinese characters to MSIE 5 and MS Word 2000 under English Windows is also supported.

(A) Download and install Microsoft Global fonts and input method engines (IME)

  1. Start MSIE. (If it has not been installed, download and install it. The latest version is 5.01 at the time of writing this article.)
  2. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/ie/Features/ime.asp (Download using Netscape browser may not work properly.)
  3. Click the link "download Global IME" (shown as blue letters).
  4. Select "Microsoft Global IME 5.01 for Chinese (Traditional) with Language Pack" in the "Choose an option" box.  (Keep the default value "English" in the "Choose a language" choice if you are using English Windows.)
  5. Click the Next button in the pages that follow until the "File Download" window appears.
  6. Select "Run this program from its current location". (Or you can download it to your PC & run it.)
  7. Click the OK button and follow the instruction to install the Global IME.
  8. After finishing the installation, you will be asked to restart the computer.
  9. Do NOT restart the computer yet, but continue to download the Simplified Chinese font by repeating the above steps and selecting "Microsoft Global IME 5.01 for Chinese (Simplified) with Language Pack" in step 4, and continue until you are asked to restart the computer during the installation.
  10. Restart the computer to enable the downloaded fonts.
After downloading the Microsoft Traditional and Simplified fonts, then configure Netscape to display Chinese characters as described in Section (B).

Follow the steps in Section (C) to switch between viewing web pages encoded in English, Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese.

(B) Configure Netscape 4 to display Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters.

Note: This section describes the steps for Netscape 4.  No configuration is required for MSIE 5.
  1. Start your Netscape web browser.
  2. Click the pulldown menu Edit => Preferences. The "Preferences" window will appear.
  3. Under the Category pane, click Appearance => Fonts.
  4. In the choice box "For the Encoding", select Traditional Chinese.
  5. In the choice boxes "Variable Width Font" and "Fixed Width Font", select MingLiu.
  6. Under the Category pane, click Navigator => Languages and click the Add button.
  7. An "Add Languages" window will appear.
  8. In the choice box "Languages", select Chinese/Taiwan [zh-TW] and click the OK button.
  9. In the "Preferences" window, click the OK button
  10. Now, you have enabled Netscape to display Traditional Chinese characters.
  11. Repeat the above steps to display Simplified Chinese characters, but (a) select the font MS Song (for Song-style font) or MS Hei (for Black-style font) in step 5; and (b) select Chinese/China [zh-CN] in step 8.
To switch between viewing web pages encoded in English, Traditional Chinese or Simplified Chinese, follow the steps in Section (C).
 

(C) Steps to change the character set in interpreting a web page in Netscape 4 & MSIE 5

Note: Even if you have done this step, but have not installed the Microsoft Traditional & Simplified Chinese fonts, you still won't be able to see the Chinese characters because the fonts are not available!

Note: To view English web pages, the fonts are easier on the eye when the character encoding scheme is set explicitly to the Western (ISO-8859-1) character set; i.e.,

Note: When we say Simplified Chinese characters are encoded in the GB encoding scheme, more precisely we are referring to the GB2312 encoding scheme, as there are some other not commonly used Simplified Chinese encoding schemes.

Note: Chinese characters defined by the Hong Kong SAR Government (for TC-Windows only)

For some commonly used Hong Kong Chinese characters not included in the Big5 character set, users can download and install the font from http://www.info.gov.hk/gccs/.  There are about 3,000 characters defined, and the font only works for Traditional Chinese Windows.


M. C. Pong
Tel: 2859 2491
E-mail: pmc@cc.hku.hk

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