These webpages at the University of Virginia Library website, shows some Chinese characters. They are not displayed well.
The characters look like Chinese characters, but they are not as they should be (what's displayed are irrelevant and very seldom used characters). Look at the poem “001” on this page here:
In Firefox, I've tried alternative languages but it doesn't resolve the display problem.
In Chrome, I've tried to use the extension Charset with different Chinese choices but still don't work out.
With Internet Explorer, tried the Big 5 encoding, it also doesn't help.
I also tried to add a language Chinese Traditional (Hong Kong SAR) into the Windows 10 – after reboot, still no luck.
How can I have the characters displayed correctly?
Best Answer
It’s not an issue of fonts, as the characters are completely wrong. Rather it has to do with Character Encoding. These are systems where a numerical value in the html is assigned a specific character (using a lookup table). Wrong encoding, wrong characters.
We don’t think of this much these days, due to the widespread adoption of Unicode, a standard encoding scheme that covers most languages’ character sets.
Before that, specific character sets were used to display non-Western language characters. In some cases, several systems exist for a single language. Fortunately you can find the identifier in the source code. In your example, it’s:
<meta charset="big5" />Big5 was one of the encodings commonly used to display Chinese characters. See: Big5
Unfortunately, the major modern browsers don’t support non-Unicode encoding selection anymore. If you can use an older version browser that can (keeping in mind security concerns when using them), then open the page (or frame in your case) and set the character encoding to Big-5.
If the page still doesn’t display properly, it’s likely the source html or web server has some issue or no longer supports this kind of action.
In your case, the page is old (1997) and probably no updates at all over time. I would recommend contacting the University Library to see if they can confirm/correct your issue.