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by Ng Pheng Siong.
Original Post: Chinese Text Display
Feed Title: (render-blog Ng Pheng Siong)
Feed URL: http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/ngps/rdf10_xml
Feed Description: Just another this here thing blog.
My Firefox installation displays the
Chinese text on this blog
in a rather ugly Sungti font where the characters are not of uniform size.
The pages of the Chinese Zope User Group
and Zope@Taiwan, in UTF-8,
come up in a much nicer Mingti font, the former in simplified Chinese and
the former in traditional Chinese. (Different script, same language. I read
both.)
Following links from the above two sites, I see that some Chinese pages
come up in the nice font and others in the ugly one. The difference
appears to be due to the HTML; here's Zope@Taiwan's:
When the "lang" attribute (or element, whatever) is set to "zh-tw",
"zh-cn", or just "zh", the page is rendered using the nice font. When it
isn't, as with my page, it comes up with the ugly font.
Let's try this... <goes off to fix up my existing blog entries...>
Yes! Now it displays in the nice font. It comes up in simplified Chinese.
Next experiment, change one paragraph to "zh-tw"... Nope, still simplified
Chinese. Hmmm, I had imagined that there is exactly one encoding for any
particular Chinese character, and how said character is displayed - simplified
or traditional - depends on some system language setting. Forgetting about
computers for a moment, I suppose this is because, to me, these are just two
scripts for writing the same language. I see I'm wrong.
Ah,
this page explains it:
"GB [...] has a set of about 7,000 simplified Chinese characters. Big5 [...]
has about 13,000 traditional Chinese characters. [...] Unicode includes all
the characters from GB and Big5 and more."
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