HTML entities not displaying on Chinese Windows

[Peter Bogdanoff]

Thanks, Richmond, this makes some sense.

How then, would I encode fields as unicode so they display reliably?

Peter

On Aug 20, 2013, at 3:42 AM, Richmond wrote:

> On 08/20/2013 01:51 AM, Peter Bogdanoff wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> The music history e-book we've been working on for the last couple of years has gotten to the point of having some people in China now translate large parts of it to Chinese. However when they open the compiled version on their Windows machines they see funny characters wherever we use an HTML entity in the HTMLtext of fields. Em dash, double quotation marks, accents, etc., all show this.
>> 
>> In our classroom use of it, Chinese students at UCLA don't complain about this problem. I don't know much about system settings in Windows, but I see Chinese characters in the system settings for some of the UCLA students whom I have to do other kinds of tech support.
>> 
>> What could be different about the Windows systems in Shanghai--at least two different people report the same issue?
> 
> Well the first thing is to reflect on the fact that, rather like the 2 Koreas there are 2 Chinas: The People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (a.k.a. Taiwan), and they have no great love for one another. Now they have both developed their own ways of representing Chinese on computers . . .
> 
> Mainland China uses the Guobiao encoding system (1,2 or 4 byte).
> 
> Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau use Big5 (1 or 2 byte)
> 
> There is also the Unicode method . . .
> and here's a groovy phrase I found trawling around on the Merry Internet: "The conversion between traditional and simplified Chinese is usually problematic" . . . Hey Nonny Nonny Nonny Nooooooooooo.
> 
> Now I don't what version of Windows all these Chinese speaking people might be using, but Windows has
> a history of multiple encoding strategies that is like a minefield.
> 
> Sorry to be such a damp squish.
> 
> Richmond.
> 
> P.S. You will probably be best going for Unicode encoding as this seems to work (on the whole) on any version
> of Windows from XP onwards.
> 
>> These people are grad music students, not computer nerds, so I don't have much to go on. I had them install the Georgia and Helvetica fonts, which are all we use, and probably what they had to begin with.
>> 
>> I also had to strip out all those characters in the version I finally sent them to translate so they could work. We want to sell the program there eventually--there's a large market there for Western music education, so this worries me.
>> 
>> Any suggestions?
>> 
>> Peter Bogdanoff
>> UCLA
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