Find out why text on a website is not properly displayed

Whenever I visit Chinese websites I stumble upon strange characters that do not resemble Chinese at all. When I visit the Chinese Google homepage for instance I see lots of blocks of hex code pairs but no Chinese characters at all. Since I’m probably not the only one with that problem I would like to explain how someone would find out why text on a website is not displayed properly and what he could do to change it.

It usually comes down to Asian languages like Chinese or Japanese that are not displayed properly on Western computers. The easiest way to install support for those languages is to go into the Windows Control Panel and activate the East Asian language options.

To do that you click on Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel, switch to the Languages tab and check the Install files for East Asian languages option under Supplemental language support there. This requires some files that need to be installed from the Windows installation CD.

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Looks better don’t you think ? If you are having troubles with a website in a different language you should first check the charset that is defined in the website’s meta tags and research that charset.