Viewing Chinese on your PC

This website is encoded in unicode (utf-8). When viewed with the correct encoding and a suitable font, you should be able to see Chinese characters and English text in non-blocky truetype fonts. Additionally, on the forums, if someone posts Japanese, simplified Chinese. Traditional Chinese or anything else, you should be able to see the correct characters (provided you have the relevant fonts installed).

This is how the Flashcards pages look using the Opera 6 web browser.

General Advice

This website displays Chinese in unicode utf-8 format, so any device you have will need to support this encoding. Ideally, set your browser's encoding to "auto-detect" but if you don't have this option, choose unicode (utf-8).

Fonts

Even if you have the correct encoding set, you will need at least one font containing Chinese characters. Please see Chinese Fonts for more information.

Windows Users General

You should be able to view this site using any Windows OS from Win95 upwards. Windows 2000 or later is better as the whole operating system uses unicode by default, which may save you some headaches.

Basically, from a bare Windows XP install, you just need to copy a suitable font such as Arial Unicode into your Windows / Fonts folder and then you shuld see Chinese as soon as you browse to this site. It really is that simple (but you need to find the font!).

For older (non-unicode) Chinese encodings, the most common software for viewing and editing Chinese on Windows is probably NJ Star. Read more about it here. In the bad old days, simplified Chinese was commonly encoded as GB and traditional Chinese was encoded as Big5. There are still many legacy pages encoded in these formats, but people are gradually seeing the light and using unicode.

Windows Users (Firefox web browser)

I use Firefox as it is fast, reliable and has hundreds of free extensions to help me use the Internet more effectively. Set the encoding using the View->Character Encoding menu.

Windows Users (Opera web browser)

Opera is what I used to use when this site first started. Set your View->Encoding menu to "Auto-Detect" and, provided you have a Chinese font installed, all the pages should work beautifully. See the Internet Explorer section below for advice on installing a Chinese font.

Windows Users (M$ Internet Explorer)

If you just want to view Chinese on your PC, you don't need any additional software. You will need to add Traditional Chinese support to your version of Windows though. You will need your original Win

If your computer is not set up to view Chinese fonts you may be given the option to install a foreign language pack when you first view this site. If you saw this message but chose "Cancel" then you can try reloading the page (press "refresh" or "reload" whilst pressing the "Shift" or "Control" keys. You may need your original Windows disk to install the Chinese font pack. The recommended Windows font for viewing this website is MingLiu as it shows the full traditional characters. MSSong and MSHei are also chinese fonts but they are simplified.
See also: Chinese Fonts

Windows Users (Netscape)

Sorry, no help available yet. Try the Tech Talk forum.

Linux Users

There are a fair number of visitors here that use Linux, search the Tech Talk forum for more information. Using Suse Linux I haven't needed to do anything to view Chinese on the site. If you are using Linux without problems please consider posting anyway, we like hearing from Linux geeks!

Macintosh users

Some Mac users have reported problems using the Safari web browser, especially when trying to type in the chatroom. Best results seem to be gained from using the free Mozilla browser for Mac. There are a lot of posts about Macs in the Tech Talk forum - use the search feature!