Question

.Issue entering chinese characters inside the text edit Windows

The Internationalization topic explains how to localize the user interface using skins.

Internationalization also means being able to type text inside the edit window for a Twiki page. I have run into the following issue with my current setup :

• Case 1 : chinese character input with Win NT4 english with Richwin IME - a Mainland China product, http://richwin.sina.com.cn/products/nt_97/index.html - and Netscape 4.72. I am able to see the characters as they are typed through the IME. However, as soon as I have edited the page from IE6/Win2K english - installed with the chinese IME-, the chinese characters are gone, and I get two 'garbage bytes' instead.

• Case 2 : chinese character input from IE6 under Win2K english. The first edit worls properly (seeing chinese characters and editing them conveniently, preview also works. However, second edit shows the HTML character encoding like this 这是我的。 (edit this page to see the encoding; previous chinese characters will only display properly if your browser is set to display chinese characters AND you have a chinese font installed, easy to achieve with Win2K by installing additional fonts/IME, for win NT4, can be displayed with IE by installing the simplified chinese language pack), which is a universal way of representing the chinese characters inside an HTML page, but is absolutely inconvenient for edition, as nobody nows the numeric representation of the chinese characters. This issue also exist with the European languages, here is an example : été à ê (edit this page to see the encoding) but to a lesser extent as you can make out the actual letter from the encoding pretty easily, though it is also inconvenient.

I believe that case 2 is the proper way to deal with chinese character representation, as it is quite universal, but we would need some kind of mechanism to correctly interpret the HTML character encoding within the edit window to make the chinese language edits practical.

• Any suggestion on how to achieve this ?
• Would a plugin be a solution to present the chinese characters by interpreting the & sequences and do further edits ?

I have initiated a chinese Web site in my company to share project information. Though now using chinese only in attached document, it would be a big plus if we were able to collaborate using the chinese language.

• TWiki version: 1 Sep 2001
• Web server: Apache 1.3.19 (Redhat)
• Server OS: Linux Redhat 7.1
• Web browser: IE6 or Netscape 4.72 both with chinese language enabled.
• Client OS: Windows NT4 english with Richwin 97 fonts/IME or Win2K french with the chinese fonts/IME

-- JeanNoelSimonnet - 08 Jan 2002

Answer

I just tested re-editing a Chinese text page (GB2312 character set) with the latest TWikiAlphaRelease code, and it worked fine, keeping the Chinese characters in the proper encoding without turning them into &#nnnn; codes. I was using Win2K on the front end, and Linux on the server, but should work on any platform that can set the charset properly. See JapaneseAndChineseSupport for details.

-- RichardDonkin - 10 Dec 2002