Chinese Characters on Websites

Soldato
Joined
10 Dec 2003
Posts
6,348
On my site, I will want/need to write Chinese sometimes and that's fine for myself but some people won't have the Chinese language pack installed on their PC and, thus, will be met with several square blocks instead of characters.

Is there any other way past this little problem other than hoping everyone has installed the Chinese language pack? I was thinking of using images but I'd prefer not to.

Thanks,

Phil.
 
Surely anyone that is even remotely capable of reading Chinese will have the pack installed? I don't care if I get squares or Chinese characters, either way I'm not reading it.
 
robmiller said:
Surely anyone that is even remotely capable of reading Chinese will have the pack installed? I don't care if I get squares or Chinese characters, either way I'm not reading it.

Well, I just tried to explain but I made it more complicated than it is, I'll sum it up and say they will also be used for educational purposes inside and outside of China. I'd rather not the user had to go through the process of updating their OS, so an easy option would be very welcome.

If it's not possible using a somewhat easy method, do you think I could use PHP to auto-generate an image in-place of the Chinese text?
 
You mean dialects, not languages, and I'm talking about Simplified Chinese. I didn't mention it because it wouldn't have mattered either way. I still have the same problem whether I want Chinese, Arabic, Japanese or Turkish text displayed in the proper manner.

The only major difference in some Chinese dialects is the speech. All text is the same except for the two choices of simplified or traditional characters.
 
They are Dialects but also if you research them they are classed as part of a language family because they are very different
 
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|Ric| said:
out of interest isn't mandarin completely different to cantonese?

Mainland China = Mandarin (Standard Speech) and Simplified Characters.
Hong Kong = Cantonese (Chinese Dialect) and Traditional Characters.

Shanghainese varies a lot more than Cantonese, but they're still both quite different. So different in fact, that people refer to them as languages, but they're officialy just dialects.

The only difference is in the speech, so people can still communicate by writing. Most speakers of different dialects can speak Mandarin as well though, as it's promoted by the Chinese government for everyone to be able to.

Except Hong Kong. Until recently, at least.

Now, can anyone recommend a solution to my problem? :p
 
The only thing i can think of is doing your chinese writing parts in photoshop, and save them as an image - that will allow most to see it?
 
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