Help:Multilingual support (East Asian)
Throughout Wikipedia, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese characters (CJKV characters) are used in relevant articles.
Computers with older operating systems with the default language set to English or other Western or Cyrillic language settings will require some setup and proper fonts (See also: List of CJK fonts) to be able to display the characters.
Newer computer operating systems may not require any additional steps to view most of common CJKV characters.
Check for existing support
If you see boxes, question marks, or meaningless letters mixing into the first part, you do not have support for East Asian characters.
Chinese
- This is Simplified Chinese text as it appears on Chinese websites and Wikipedia
- 人人生来自由，
在尊严和权利上一律平等。
他们有理性和良心，
请以手足关系的精神相对待。
- Compare it to this picture of what it should look like:
- This is Traditional Chinese text as it appears on Chinese websites and Wikipedia
- 人人生來自由，
在尊嚴和權利上一律平等。
他們有理性和良心，
請以手足關係的精神相對待。
- Compare it to this picture of what it should look like:
Japanese
- This is Japanese text as it appears on Japanese websites and Wikipedia
- すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、
かつ、尊厳と権利と について平等である。
人間は、理性と良心とを授けられており、
互いに同胞の精神をもって行動しなければならない。
- Compare it to this picture of what it should look like:
Korean
- This is Korean text as it appears on Korean websites and Wikipedia
- 모든 인간은 태어날 때부터
자유로우며 그 존엄과 권리에
있어 동등하다. 인간은 천부적으로
이성과 양심을 부여받았으며 서로
형제애의 정신으로 행동하여야 한다.
- Compare it to this picture of what it should look like:
Vietnamese
- This is Vietnamese text as it appears on Vietnamese websites and Wikipedia
- Tất cả mọi người sinh ra đều được tự do và bình đẳng về nhân phẩm và quyền.
Mọi con người đều được tạo hóa ban cho lý trí và lương tâm và cần phải đối xử với nhau trong tình bằng hữu.
畢哿每𠊚生𦋦調得自由吧平等𡗅人品吧權。
每𡥵𠊚調得造化頒咮理智吧良心吧懃沛對處𢭲𠑬𡧲情朋友。
- Compare it to this picture of what it should look like:
Instructions
Windows 95, 98, ME and NT
In order to display Asian characters in your browser, download and install the Microsoft Global Input Method Editors (IMEs) of the language(s) that you need (make sure to select "with Language Pack"). This is the system extension that provides the language support to your English Windows system when you are using Internet Explorer. Select the "with language pack" option if you do not have any related character set on your machine. The IMEs allow you to input CJK, while the language pack is the character set that you need to display the particular language. If you are an Office XP user, the Global IMEs will not work for you; you will need to install a new version of the IMEs for Office XP users.
Sometimes the system offers to download Asian fonts by default while viewing pages in those languages. Otherwise, update your system manually with these language support packs.
Windows 2000
Windows XP and Server 2003
Windows XP and Server 2003 include native support for East Asian languages. To install the files, check the Install files for East Asian languages in the Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Languages. Note that a minimum of 230 MB of disk space is required and that the Windows CD-ROM is needed while installing support for East Asian languages using this method. (Non-East Asian localizations only)
Alternatively, you can use the installation packages intended for 98/NT by following these links:
No disc is needed for this option.
Windows Vista and 7
Windows Vista and Windows 7 includes support for East Asian characters in the standard installation.
Mac OS X
All recent versions of OS X (10.4+) support East Asian characters natively.
In very old versions of OS X, such as 10.1 you had to install Languages Kits from Apple in order to read Chinese, Japanese or Korean on the Internet. The Language Kit for CJK contains WorldScript software known as scripts which support the encoding for the character set of a particular language. Each language needs a separate script. In more recent versions of OS X, it is included with all installations of OS X.
Once you have installed the Language Kit, just select the particular language character set that you need to see on the Internet page either from View > Encoding (for Microsoft IE) or View > Character set (for Netscape).
GNOME
GNOME supports East Asian characters natively. You may need to install appropriate fonts.
KDE
KDE supports East Asian characters natively. You may need to install the following packages:
- Simplified Chinese: kde-i18n-zhcn for KDE 3.5.x, kde-l10n-zhcn for KDE 4.x
- Traditional Chinese: kde-i18n-zhtw for KDE 3.5.x, kde-l10n-zhtw for KDE 4.x
- Japanese: kde-i18n-ja for KDE 3.5.x, kde-l10n-ja for KDE 4.x
- Korean: kde-i18n-ko for KDE 3.5.x, kde-l10n-ko for KDE 4.x
If this does not help, or works partially, but some characters are still missing, you may need to run qtconfig, and add a comprehensive unicode font to your chosen browser font's substitutions.
Debian-based GNU/Linux
In order to display Chinese, Japanese and/or Korean characters, you must install some font packages:
| Language | Serif | Sans serif |
|---|---|---|
| Chinese (both Simplified & Traditional) | ttf-arphic-uming | ttf-wqy-zenhei |
| Japanese | ttf-sazanami-mincho | ttf-sazanami-gothic |
| Korean | ttf-unfonts-core | |
There are some alternative packages for some languages, but the ones listed above do work.
Fedora Linux
Install the appropriate ttfonts packages.
For Fedora Core 3, the packages are ttfonts-zh_TW (traditional Chinese), ttfonts-zh_CN (simplified Chinese), ttfonts-ja (Japanese) and ttfonts-ko (Korean). E.g. 'yum install ttfonts-ko'
For Fedora 4-7, the packages are fonts-Japanese, fonts-Chinese, and fonts-Korean. The command to download and install these fonts is
yum install fonts-Japanese fonts-Chinese fonts-Korean
Gentoo Linux
Enabling the cjk (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) USE flag improves East Asian support in some packages, but is not essential.
Some useful font packages are (category media-fonts) arphicfonts (han), baekmuk-fonts (hangul) and kochi-substitute (hiragana/katakana).
e.g. for viewing Chinese text:
# emerge arphicfonts
FreeBSD
CJK fonts can be installed on FreeBSD using freebsd ports collection:
# cd /usr/ports/x11-fonts/cyberbit-ttfonts && make install clean # cd /usr/ports/Japanese/font-kochi && make install clean
or by installing precompiled packages:
# pkg_add -r ja-kochi-ttfonts
NetBSD
On NetBSD and other systems using pkgsrc, one can install CJK fonts with the following commands:
# cd /usr/pkgsrc/fonts/kochi-ttf && make install clean # cd /usr/pkgsrc/fonts/cyberbit-ttf && make install clean
Other UNIX Distributions
Download the appropriate .ttf file (for example, kochi-gothic-subst.ttf) and copy it to your system's TrueType font directory (for example, /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/). For example (for Dejavu fonts):
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/dejavu/dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.33.tar.bz2
tar -xjvf dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.33.tar.bz2 (you need bzip support, or use bzcat dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.33.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -)
cp ./dejavu-fonts-ttf-2.33/ttf/* /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TTF
(or get the link to the current version here, and then update this help)
Then run (as root):
fc-cache /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/
Restart X if it is in use, and the new font should be installed.
Unicode Fonts
- List of free unified Simplified/Traditional fonts Integrates both Simplified and Traditional Chinese with display-tuned fonts (without anti-aliased blurring)
- List of free Simplified Chinese fonts
- List of free Traditional Chinese fonts
- List of free Japanese fonts
- List of free Korean fonts