How can I get Chinese/Japanese characters to display properly instead of squares?

Anonymous
2009-11-25T18:51:47+00:00

I'm using Windows 7 x64 Ultimate and I have some songs in Chinese and Japanese.  In Windows Explorer, the characters would SOMETIMES show correctly and sometimes they would be blocks.  Whenever I use iTunes, they're always in blocks and in other programs (ex. synctoy 2.1 and google chrome). I've already installed the Chinese (Trad. and Simplified) and Japanese language packs but the file names still show up in blocks. I also restarted several times after installation of the languages to see if that fixed things but it didn't. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

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Anonymous
2010-03-16T00:54:57+00:00

Okay fine.... I stopped being lazy and found the solution by trial and error. So the trick is to change the system locale to Chinese (PRC) and then changing the system locale back to English (United States). I can now see the Simplified Chinese characters correctly in my buddyllist as well as in browser titles. I've attached a screenshot of the menus to get to the system locale. Basically go where you changed your input method and follow the screenshot below:

http://www.twitpic.com/18uhgc

This is a bug with the IME, I think, but nothing a few changes and reboots won't fix! Good luck!

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-12-25T10:10:37+00:00

    Go to Control Panel

    click on Region

    click on Location

    change Home location to China

    click on Administrative

    see the second subject: Language for non-Unicode programs

    click on Change system locale...

    choose Chinese (Simplified, China)

    click Apply,

    click OK

    Then the Operating System (OS) will Restart the Windows

    After your Windows restarted, you can view Chinese .txt in Notepad or  Word Files

    Your Windows system is still in the original Default Language, such as English or whatever language your OS used, even the Region/Locale...has been changed.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-07-19T19:12:30+00:00

    keep in mind that some fonts lack asian characters and thus will display those as squares etc. Minion Pro is one that does not have japanese characters, whereagainst Georgia and Arial do.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-06-13T03:55:21+00:00

    I can't believe how difficult it is in Windows to do this.  If you really need to switch between English and Japanese (or an other language) on a regular basis, get a Mac.  It is sooooooo much easier.  It's built in, you simply toggle CMD-Shift between languages.  That's it.  Nothing to it.  It's that simple.  It works in all programs.

    I've recently been forced to use a PC with Windows7 and I've spent hours trying to resolve all kinds of conflicts.  Now I get Japanese to work (after multiple key strokes) but instead of appearing in the document, it appears in a tiny floating window… I have yet to figure out how to just get it to work simply the way it does on a Mac.  Very frustrating.  That's why I ended up here - to see if there are some solutions.  I haven't found any.  My solution is to just get a Mac...

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-04-12T09:55:28+00:00

    An even easier solution that I got from CShark on superuser.com

    Create a text file called 火.txt and save it to your desktop. And then reboot.

    This works because of font-caching.

    There are two main parts in Windows that create the cache. One is the Windows Explorer, the other one the DirectWrite part of DX. The problem is that DXW fails with Unicode. So when a program starts up using unicode and the dxw api, the font-cache is build by dxw and does not contain unicode because of the earlier fail.

    However, if you place the 火.txt file on your desktop, explorer fills the cache first. And explorer supports unicode, so the cache is initialized correctly.

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