Chinese characters how do I see them correctly on my computer?

David,

There are a number of reasons why you're not going to see Chinese characters correctly. Most of them deal with the "language" pack available for the application you're working with. Even then, there may still be some issues.

Email, for instance, is particularly problematic, especially if the message has been forwarded. When Outlook opens a mail message it's going to try to apply the character set to the message based on what the message tells it is necessary to display correctly. Unfortunately, if there are multiple character sets contained in the message body, there can be some confusion when the message is parsed.

The browsers (both IE and Firefox) also have "language packs" that can be installed to allow for rendering of the languages. Especially with .NET 2.0, it's much easier for a developer to give a measure of "automatic" language sensing to their web sites/applications. This way, when a visitor hits a site and the visitors language preference is Spanish, the web site will display the Spanish language strings appropriately.

The best way to insure that you're going to get proper display of character sets, you should try to get your hands on a language-specific release of your operating system. If you prefer to work in Chinese, look to purchase the Traditional or Simplified Chinese build of XP. That way, it's "designed" to display the Chinese character set natively.

Hope this helps,
Ric

Thanks, I think i'll try with the language pack for the browser first.

i want to view chinese, japanese and korean characters in my outlook (english version) i can view english, japanese and korean but NOT chinese... any suggestins please..

My solution for HTML messages with Chinese characters in MS Outlook 2007 was to :
Go to Tools > Options > Mail Format (tab) and then:
Select drop down option "Western European (Windows)" encoding for outgoing messages

Then for incoming messages that are not readable, I open the message, click on "Other Actions" in the "Message" tab > Encoding > Chinese Simplified. The type of Chinese Simplified font doesn't seem to matter much. This can still leave unreadable characters in the subject line though.

In my rpaid browsing, I saw a Microsofter suggest changing to Chinese language Vista and Outlook, but that was too extreme for me. The above tested well in Vista Home and Win XP Pro. Also, simplified Chinese fonts were intalled via Control Panel in Regional ... as well. Mainlanders seem to use simplified usually.

Hope this helps others as well.