User:Polobird/Viewing Unicode Characters

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This page is not meant to be an article. Instead, it acts like a help guide for readers unable to see Unicode ideograph characters. If you find this page useful as an open guide or as material on certain help pages, redistribution of this page is welcomed.
Thank you for your attention! =^.^=

This page lists out fonts that are possible for helping to read Unicode ideograph characters. As I (Polobird) do not know every single language on the world, only the used fonts usually come arcoss with Westerners (while I am not one) and me.

You cannot see the letters as they are ill-presented as "messed-up codes", question marks, spaces or boxes. To solve this problem, "missing encodings" have to be acquired, which is actually "fonts" of that certain character set of the language, or writing style to be exact.

One example is that, if someone's computer cannot show English language alphabets (obviously this is totally impossible), it means that the encoding "Western (European)" (or whatever it is named) is "missing" or "unusable". So, font type containing the "simplest elements" (can be alphabets or ideographs depending on the language nature) of that language is needed. In this case, "Times New Roman" is one of the suitable candidates because:

It contains the elements of "simplest elements" needed for use or to be shown. (*)
It is readable, or so-called "standard".
It is easy to be found on the Internet.

Get the font downloaded somewhere on the web as a free source (any risk involving web-surfing is not my responsiblity) and install it into the Fonts folder. After setting the encoding to the corresponding font in the browser, reading of those special characters will be available.

* Now the point is, one font may not contain all every characters needed for extended use. One cause is that the font is for artistic use, so really rarely used characters like pilcrow has no significant existence. Another reason is that the number of "alphabets" does not change because "neologisms" are made of new combinations of alphabets, but new words has to be made in ideogrpah language systems like Chinese. So updated version of them are needed. See the item Chinese for a little more information.

[edit] Preface (See First)

If readers do not know what the terms used above means, please check them and have a preliminary concept:

Unicode

Ideograph

Encoding

The fonts are all TureType font format, with name extension of either "ttf" or "ttc".

[edit] Region Of Unicode CJK(V)

There is a project aimed to unifiy all ideogrpahs from different languages, different countries and different appearances of letters, that is, temporarily, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the joining Vietnamese.

Traditional Chinese: MingLiU / PMingLiU (Minchō), DFKai-SB (Regular Script), with Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set

* HKSCS is the above mentioned "updated version" of words in the encoding "Traditional Chinese" ("Big5") and part of "Universal Character Set". The usually added words are: Cantonese interjections, Chinese stroke elements, Japanese hiragana and katakana, scientific terms, written and settled names of places and people, etc.

Simplified Chinese: SimSun

Japanese: MS Gothic / MS Mincho / MS Gothic & MS PGothic & MS UI Gothic

Korean: Gulim(Che) / Dotum(Che)

Vietnamese: In core fonts for the Web?