Mac- Forumosa- Chinese Charachters

When I type Chinese (Big5 - Hanin) into the reply box I can see the charachters, however when I submit all I see is a row of ???s.

Here’s a little test;

Well, blow me. Why didn’t it work yesterday in my restaurant thread? I was getting so frustrated I ended up using pinyin.

Any other Mac users get these problems?

L.

Your problem is likely related to your web browser.
I don’t use Safari, but it’s probaly an option like View>Character Encoding> (Choose the Chinese option you want)

By the way, you’re typing it right, you’re just not reading it right. (That’s not a good excuse for writing “characters” with TWO "h"s though (TWICE)).

:blush: :blush: :blush: …and the doctor said my eyes were improving yesterday, sherioushly :slight_smile:. Thanks brewstu

Yup, I can confirm that. In Safari, go View → Text Encoding → Traditional Chinese (Big 5) and Chinese will magically appear. But I should add that after doing so, you may see mysterious question marks in the English!

Tried that. I still got a line of ???s though. Strange it seems to be okay today.

Well, there’s usually more than one Chinese option to choose from. Sure you chose the right one first time round?

I can’t think of anything else. I don’t have a Mac, or use Safari, and I can’t type Chinese. :stuck_out_tongue:

:slight_smile: That’s a problem with encoding. A character (lets say the 100th) in one encoding might be a different character in another one.

Choose either big5 or Roman (iso-8859-1) and something is going to look wrong.

No one’s ever suggested this site change it’s default encoding to big5 or even unicode?

I wonder can Gus or Moaman give us the answer?

Which is the best encoding to view and write Chinese (on a Mac) on Forumosa?

Test

welp. they should change the encoding of this site to be something so users automatically see chinese though they’ll have problems with some roman characters.

You notice going to other chinese sites without problems? They’re set to switch your browser once you get there; no need for you to change it.

Perhaps big5 for now and definitely unicode someday or now is the way to go.

If anyone knows Chinese, here’s a source of help

phpbb-tw.net/phpbb/

But the guys can figure it out on their own too.

edit: here ya go. if you guys are up to it, here’s a start:

phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=231451
phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=246070

Instead of all these future questions, why not just change the site so it works for everyone. :slight_smile:

Maybe someone should specifically ask of there are any plans to convert this site to unicode. That’s the only way to make sure the site will display properly for everyone.

Perhaps this could be done with the new server change. What do you think Gus?

I may be mistaken, but Chinese characters being encoded as Unicode or as Big5 has nothing to do with why they won’t appear automatically. The reason why Chinese isn’t appearing automatically is that Forumosa’s HTML is explicitly declaring itself as Western. You can see it for yourself if you view page source. At the very top of every page you will see:

http-equiv=“Content-Type” content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

and so Safari (and Camino and perhaps Firefox) will render the page automatically as Western.

All you would have to do to make Chinese appear automatically without affecting the English would be to change this one little varible “charset” to Big5 (as I think Chinese characters are encoded as Big5 instead of Unicode within Forumosa’s archives.)

Accented characters in other languages. don’t seem to show up correctly when using Big5. Any other reason you guys aren’t defaulting to Big5? To do all languages at the same time correctly, why not Unicode.

Unicode is the way. :slight_smile: