Help talk:Multilingual support (East Asian)

Fixed misplaced topic

As an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Enabling_complex_text_support_for_Indic_scripts 亮HH 08:34, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

The first link for Windows 98 support doesnt work. 84.144.121.21

Screen reader support

The screen reader I use to edit Wikipedia is telling me there are question marks instead of Chinese or Japanese and other languages. Is it the browser or the screen reader? Robot569 18:58, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

What screen reader and what browser do you use? I experienced that if something is written in Chinese with IE, Mozilla can't read it, or the other way around. But that only happened with sites which dont you Unicode Encoding, Wiki does. 亮HH 15:16, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

I use JAWS for Windows. Robot569 01:15, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Appearance

Should the two compared texts look exactly the same, or similar ignoring size and bolding? The non-Wikipedia text looks a size or two larger (not font size+1 as in|S Sepp]] 14:21, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

East asian characters within programs

Should this article be expanded to include how to show east asian characters within I am curious as to why characters from only these 3 languages always come up as question marks (???), yet other alphabets, such as the Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Georgian, Devanāgarī, Kannada, Brāhmī, et. al. seem to come through just fine. 12.40.34.150 21:23, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Fonts for these scripts are very large compared to those for other scripts. The likely have not been installed on your system due to disk space considerations. —Ruud 21:59, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

平

平 > it shows me \/ where the picture says /\. Understand? In both traditional and simplified. The rest is ok. Is it bad? I don't read hanzi Mallerd 19:48, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

They are called variant Chinese characters. The two characters you mentioned are perfectly interchangeable in Chinese (might not be so in Korean or Japanese). The /\ variation is the one found in Kangxi dictionary (a famous Chinese dictionary compiled before modern time). The \/ variation is more commonly used today. A typesetter/publisher might choose one variant over the other for aesthetics reasons. --Voidvector 20:43, 28 October 2007 (UTC)

Pocket PC

Is there any help in getting English Pocket PCs to display CJK on websites like Wikipedia, apart from using native ROMs? Oh, and preferably free/open-source? I have an HTC TyTN (Hermes) (Cingular/AT&T 8525) running Windows Mobile 6. --Geopgeop (T) 06:34, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

Other Installation Options

According to the links provided on the pages, there are two options to download the appropriate languages: One if you have Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows 95, or Windows NT 4.0 and Windows Office XP. Now what if I have Windows XP without Windows Office XP? Am I unable to display East Asian characters? Does Microsoft suck that much? Also, I don't have a Windows XP install disc, so don't suggest that; my computer didn't come with one. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.181.40.100 (talk) 05:44, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

If you only want to be able to read it in the browser, you can try this: Download an Asian font from the Internet (there are a few links on this page). Copy it into your font directory. Go to options of your browser select the font for the intended language. Most modern browsers should be able to display it correctly. --Voidvector (talk) 09:16, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Meta?

Isn't this page best placed on meta, for other English projects to use too? - Mtmelendez ^(Talk) 15:13, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

This is probably because for the purpose of editing in Wikipedia only. Chongkian (talk) 04:02, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Writing Korean

I want to write Korean, but a disk is required for installation, and I didnt find him. Where I can get the files needed to installation support for Korean? I have Windows XP, Proffesional edition, version 5.1.2600. --77.125.79.5 (talk) 11:00, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Windows 7 East Asian Language support

Contrary to what is stated in this article, it does not appear, in fact, that all Windows 7 versions support East Asian characters out of the box. Please view the microsoft support thread here:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/i-have-windows-7-english-version-it-cannot-display/3a13c2d6-7170-4ef6-b2b0-01500ae7e790

In fact, the situation is worse for many people, as you previously were able to install support no matter what version of windows you had, but now it appears that Microsoft is limiting it to Enterprise or Ultimate edition owners. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 219.76.220.202 (talk) 04:54, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

The discussion you linked to is in regards to filenames, not text in general. All editions of Windows 7 include East Asian fonts by default. However, if you install a Chinese version of Windows and enter a filename in GB, or a Japanese version and create a file with a name in JIS, the filename will show up in Mojibake when viewed on a western encoding version of Windows 95-2000, and as ????? in Windows XP and later. Same goes for text files saved as ANSI and not Unicode, though in this case it only turns up in Mojibake. As for Ultimate/Enterprise, that's only if you want the system display language to be changed. For example, instead of "Control Panel>Language settings", it becomes "控制面板>语言设置". To fix this problem, or at least partially alleviate it (since I'm running a western encoding version of Windows 7, and Japanese Visual novel games like to name their files in JIS, meaning that many games won't run as they simply cannot find the file), I use AppLocale, however this is a completely different issue, and is irrelevant to browsing Wikipedia in any case. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 08:19, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Help please

I recently rebuilt my hard drive and I lost my language extension packs, which Memeo appears to ahve not backed up. I tried to install everything listed on the page, but I'm still seeing boxes. My computer has been turned off numerous times since the download, so it's not that I haven't restarted my computer.--Scottandrewhutchins (talk) 00:47, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

If you don't get an answer here soon, I suggest you try the Computing reference desk. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:56, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

What is your operating system? What region is your operating system installed as? Do you have access to installation discs of said operating system?

• Windows XP: Go to Control Panel, "Regional Settings" (or something like that, haven't touched an XP machine in years), and there should be a "Language" tab. Click the checkbox which says "Install fonts for Asian languages" (not word-for-word), and it will prompt for you to insert the Windows XP installation disc.
• Windows Vista/7: As far as I know, most, if not all, regional variants of Windows Vista and Windows 7 include Asian language fonts by default. Someone correct me if I am wrong.
• Ubuntu: Right off the top of my head it's a bit hard (not running my Linux machine at the moment), but I'm pretty sure there's something like a "Language settings" or a similar name in the system settings, where you have to check a few boxes next to "Chinese", "Japanese", etc. in order for Ubuntu to download and install fonts.
• Debian: I can't remember off the top of my head, but you're probably going to have to apt-get the fonts from a repository somewhere (haven't used Debian in years).

Also, though it's highly unlikely, if you're using any internet browser older than Internet Explorer 3.0, you won't be able to display East Asian fonts correctly. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 08:11, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm using Windows XP Professional. It was installed as the 2002 version, and then I did the Windows updates. The characters display neither in Internet Explorer nor Google Chrome. I haven't downloaded Firefox because it always crashed before. --Scottandrewhutchins (talk) 16:21, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

When I did it through the control panel, it worked. Now I'm seeing the Asian characters.--Scottandrewhutchins (talk) 17:18, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

"what it should look like"

Earlier, the article claimed that the various images showed what the languages "should look like." I thought this was misleading. Certainly, the font used for Vietnamese was not a very nice font. If a reader has Arial or New Times Roman, as I think almost everyone does, the displayed text will look better than the image. Vietnam hasn't used Chinese characters for almost a century, and the image was misleading on this issue as well. Kauffner (talk) 10:56, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

Web Fonts

Does Wikipedia use web fonts? They could be used to provide multilingual support to users without the necessary fonts installed in their OS. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nathanathanathan (talk • contribs) 04:13, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

What about Manchu script?

Template:Contains Manchu text has a link towards this page, and this page has not yet provided information about Manchu script. Can it be added here? I have made a sample on this page. --Obonggi (talk) 14:52, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

That sample is not working fully for me. I see Manchu characters, laid out top to bottom, but the individual letters are rotated 90 degrees. I am on a Mac which has the latest version of Mac OS on it, and so which is normally very good at displaying non-English text, even when it’s written in odd directions.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 15:05, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

The example looks fine to me on my Windows 10 computer, but let me be nitpicking on one point: In Unicode terminology this is the Manchu writing system which uses the Mongolian script. Besides a graphic at a higher resolution than Manchutexttest.png would be desirable, perferably an SVG (i.e., in vector format). Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 15:21, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Tried it with Firefox too (my first look was with Safari). That too has them laid out right but out by 90 degrees, using a different font or at least rendering it at a smaller size. The PNG does seem very small and hard to see clearly, it is smaller than the text in both my tests.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 15:28, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

I have meanwhile produced the graphic Manchu sample.svg illustrating the same text. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 16:03, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

It is strange that Template:Contains Mongolian text has a link to Help:Multilingual support though the script (esp. the required fonts and rendering engines) is the same. BTW: I had made an error in my SVG which is now fixed. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 16:38, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Annoyed at it not working I had a look at it, and it seems the template is missing some useful CSS. Just specifying the writing-mode as vertical is not enough, as it can still display characters upright. After all that is correct for Chinese, Japanese, and for Latin text mixed into them such as numbers. But adding text-orientation:sideways fixes it - it forces it to render the text on its side. I’ve been testing this in Template:ManchuSibeUnicode/sandbox and Template:ManchuSibeUnicode/testcases, if anyone wants to have a look. See hereand here for more information.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 18:08, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Interesting. I suppose the CSS code snippet text-orientation:sideways; -webkit-text-orientation:sideways; could also be used in the {{lang}} template when the language specified is {{lang|mnc}} (i.e. {{lang|mnc-Mong}}, certainly not {{lang|mnc-Latn}}) for Manchu or {{lang|mn}}/{{lang|mon}} (except {{lang|...-Cyrl}} or {{lang|...-Latn}}) for Mongolian. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 18:45, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

It’s a bit more complex than that: it would probably need -webkit-text-orientation: sideways; -moz-text-orientation: sideways; -ms-text-orientation: sideways; text-orientation: sideways;. I needed the webkit one for Safari, the others would be needed to cover all browsers. There may also be other CSS elements that might be useful, to fix any alignment issues; the generated content article has a good overview. It’s the sort of thing that might be worth encapsulating in a template, much as {{Writing-mode}} encapsulates all the messy details of specifying the writing direction.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 07:17, 30 December 2016 (UTC)

Old Japanese Kanji (Kyūjitai) & Hentaigana

I don’t see the need for these recently added sections. The first is simply confusing. It says "The text below has been language-tagged as Japanese and used the Unicode variation selector for Kyūjitai", but it’s not, it’s just tagged as Japanese, with non-standard characters inserted as unicode. It then has two images, the differences between them being small and hard to spot, and it’s impossible to tell which matches the text above at normal text sizes. The second is simpler: it just shows the text and an image, and it either works or does not. It doesn’t work for me and I’m on the newest version of Mac OS which suggests few people will see it.

But neither makes sense on this page, as neither will appear in articles normally. Probably the only articles which use them are their articles, Kyūjitai and Hentaigana, where they should be fully explained. Readers seem unlikely to come across them in articles which don’t explain them, so won’t end up here looking for an explanation. And as such it’s misleading to suggest that e.g. readers need to install additional fonts (on top of the normal fonts for CJK support) to make sure they see them.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 01:25, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Nay, the Kyūjitai sample contains only standard Unicode characters, but there are five valid variation sequences among them: 尊󠄁平󠄁者󠄁胞󠄁精󠄀 vs. default 尊平者胞精. (Cf. my source text: U+E0100 is variation selector 17.) A better example for these Japanese variation sequences might be their use in writing the names of contemporary people and places.

Hentaigana are much more common than, say, Chữ nôm, though it is true that these no longer official variant Hiragana characters have only been "unicoded" last June. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 16:36, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Common on WP? So can you point me to the articles that contain it, other than Hentaigana itself. This is not a WP article, meant to provide encyclopaedic coverage of a topic. It’s a help page, meant to help readers of en.wp who have problems displaying CJK text. As far as I can tell those sections neither identify common problems nor offer useful solutions (I am fairly technical, but don’t even know how I would "prioritize any OpenType fonts which comply with the Adobe-Japan1-6 specification").--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 17:30, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

Well, Hentaigana are not at all common on WP, but often seen in Japan. — I agree that hardly anybody knows what "OpenType fonts which comply with the Adobe-Japan1-6 specification" are. Maybe we should describe font capabilities on List of CJK fonts in more detail. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 18:12, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

I have removed the sections, with no rationale being given for keeping them as part of WP help. E.g. there is no page they are used on which the sections helped with. As-is they were just likely to confuse readers and editors.

Help pages are for help with Wikipedia: how to use it, whether as an editor or reader. They are not meant as guides to writing systems, or parts of them, used in the wider world that are not normally used on WP. For that we have articles, such as Hentaigana, where they can be properly explained and examples given.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 19:49, 28 October 2017 (UTC)

Zhang & Sawndip?

I notice a section on Zhang has been added. by Johnkn63, without any rationale. Like the obscure Japanese variants discussed immediately above I don’t think this belongs in this help page, which is for helping people with viewing Asian languages in WP articles.

Zhuang is not that widely used, though it is used - place names in Guangxi are one common use. But outside of articles on the language the only way it is used is the official PRC Romanisation, which uses Latin characters. The official Romanisation has been official since 1982, and requires no special browser support to view. It is universally used in my experience, and is what we should be using too.

As such there is no poiint include Zhuang here. It is only likely to confuse readers if they look at it and see missing characters, due to Sawndip support in Unicode still being incomplete. But they should not be having this problem in articles, so this section serves no purpose.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 04:31, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

I think user Johnkn63 felt prompted to add Sawndip here after I had mentioned this page on my talk page. And that discussion was started after they had replaced File:Saw sawndip.svg with 𭨡 on Chinese characters without an alternative graphic for this recently introduced Unicode character that only a minor portion of users can view as plain text. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 22:35, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer. I agree with your points there that support at the moment is still lacking. I’m on macOS which with it’s regular updates and Apple’s heavy involvement with Unicode usually adopts new standards very quickly. But some of the characters are missing for me, and if that’s true it’s probably true for every other mainstream OS.

It’s not my reason for objecting to it though. My reason is simply that as far as I can tell Sawndip is not used in articles, except obviously Sawndip. Zhuang is, but it normally uses the modern Romanisation which requires no special support as it’s just Latin characters – it even uses them for tones making it particularly straightforward to render, so there is no need for help on it here.

We should continue to use the modern Romanisation for Zhuang, not the earlier Cyrillic based script or Sawndip which is older than both. Sawndip should not appear in articles outside of rare exceptions where it is important to include it, and if used an image is far better as far more people can view it.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 23:20, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

The rationale for adding Zhuang to this page is because it has now become a part of Unicode CJK idoegraphs, and the reason that it was added now was because I only became aware of this article after LiliCharlie's commment on it. Whilst in Chinese only characters for some place names are common, the same is not true in Zhuang. The Romanisation script whilst used in official documents, the Sawndip characters where submitted by China also a form of offiicial recoginition. The only study I know of of comparative usage showed when writting people are twice as likely to use Sawndip as the Romanised system. The sample given in this article is compatible with Unicode 10, if characters do not display it is because of lack of Unicode, IS010646, support. If some of the Zhuang characters do not display it means that some Unicode CJK ideographs for other languages will also likely not display. Johnkn63 (talk) 23:49, 2 February 2018 (UTC)

CJK characters in Unicode not displaying is a font issue for many OS, in that most Vendors don't seem to try to keep up. Apart from commericial fonts, there are several free fonts that support this. Installing the latest version of the HanaMin fonts both A and B will give full CJK coverage. When Extension G is added then one will need C aswell.Johnkn63 (talk) 00:21, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

1. Unicode explicitly does not expect implementations to properly display all encoded characters and character strings. They can be fully Unicode conformant without. On this, see chapter 5 of the Unicode core specification Implementation Guidelines, especially section 5.3 Unknown and Missing Characters. You might also want to read chapter 3, Conformance.
2. It is disrespectful to confront users with Unicode characters when it is clear this is going to cause display problems for most of them. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 01:18, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

You write "The only study I know of of comparative usage showed when writting people are twice as likely to use Sawndip as the Romanised system". What study is this? My experience is that the Latin script is the only thing used in signs etc. in Guangxi. And given the Chinese government’s top-down approach to language, when they decide on an approach that’s what gets used. There are alternative ways to write Chinese such as Written Cantonese, Bopomofo, but they only survive as they are used outside China.

This page exists to help people who have trouble with East Asian languages used in WP articles. As such it only needs to cover scripts used in articles. Outside articles on the language Sawndip is not and should not be used, both for the technical reasons and as it is not the normal way of writing Zhuang. So there is no need to have a section on Sawndip, even less so one on Latin Romanisation of Zhuang which requires no special support.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 01:41, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

The study concerned is a master's thesis of a student from Guangxi University that can be seen here. The Romanised script is one of the 5 official scripts so it appears on official signs, publish laws, etc, however is not usually actively used in primary and secondary level this century, there are to my knowledge less than a dozen primary schools that use it. At University level the Romanised is taught so to there people to produce the official signs, and some official jobs in Guangxi, require, or at least give a bonus, to pass a romanised Zhuang test. However in terms of evryday written Zhuang such as songs people write down, these are usually hand written in Sawndip and where several copies required photocopied. In WP these Zhuang charcters are also found, for example, in wiktionary, and the Zhuang wiki. The fonts one uses to support Zhuang characters, are also those most likely to be used to read a digital version of say 现代汉语词典, one of the most widely used Chinese dictionaries. Chữ Nôm is not an official script and I guess far few users than Sawndip, therefore the section at least as valid. Johnkn63 (talk) 04:15, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

I would think that Chinese primary and secondary schools insist on Putonghua. I am reminded of this image from the pinyin article File:Dajia-shuo-Putonghua-2817.jpg from a kindergarten. It’s an interesting matter but secondary to my main concern: with a few exceptions we should not be using Sawndip in articles, and do not do so as far as I know. What other wp sites do is irrelevant: of course Wiktionary and the Zhuang WP have different approaches. But this page is for supporting users of en.wp.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 04:41, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

No one is expecting there to be a large number of Zhuang characters in the English wiki, though since in China book and song titles tend to use CJK ideographs rather than an alphabetical script, they would be found on more than one page if only in the "Citations" and "Works cited" sections. Better as a section on this help page than a start a new page. A little more information could be given, and some information updated. Johnkn63 (talk) 08:52, 3 February 2018 (UTC)

Manchu

The page doesn't seem to address Manchu rendering support, but presumably most people have a problem viewing Manchu script on Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.183.26.161 (talk) 11:09, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Manchu uses the Mongolian script, which is discussed briefly at Help:Multilingual_support#Mongolian. If you have a Unicode Mongolian font installed then Manchu text on Wikipedia pages should display correctly. BabelStone (talk) 12:03, 23 January 2019 (UTC)