# How do I get Chinese characters to display in Mozilla?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-get-chinese-characters-to-display-in-mozilla/301911>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [May 1, 2005, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-get-chinese-characters-to-display-in-mozilla/301911 "2005-05-01T00:59:59Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![liirogue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/dbc845/32.png) [@liirogue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/liirogue)\
**Post date:** [May 1, 2005, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-get-chinese-characters-to-display-in-mozilla/301911/1 "2005-05-01T00:59:59Z")

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Argh! All I’m getting are giant ? marks. How do I fix this??

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**Author:** ![AZCowboy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/97f17d/32.png) [@AZCowboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AZCowboy)\
**Post date:** [May 1, 2005, 1:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-get-chinese-characters-to-display-in-mozilla/301911/2 "2005-05-01T01:06:40Z")

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Assuming it is the same as Firefox:

Tools/Options/General/Languages/Chinese/Add/OK

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**Author:** ![Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d26b3c/32.png) [@Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Blue_Sky)\
**Post date:** [May 1, 2005, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-get-chinese-characters-to-display-in-mozilla/301911/3 "2005-05-01T01:12:18Z")

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> [@AZCowboy](#):
>
> Assuming it is the same as Firefox:
> 
> Tools/Options/General/Languages/Chinese/Add/OK

I just tried that except for Japanese and then went to Amazon’ Japanese site and it didn’t work. I closed the browser and re-opened, but got the same thing.

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**Author:** ![liirogue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/dbc845/32.png) [@liirogue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/liirogue)\
**Post date:** [May 1, 2005, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-get-chinese-characters-to-display-in-mozilla/301911/4 "2005-05-01T02:34:00Z")

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> [@AZCowboy](#):
>
> Assuming it is the same as Firefox:
> 
> Tools/Options/General/Languages/Chinese/Add/OK

Yes, it is the same thing as Firefox. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work - I added all of the Chinese options, and like **Mr. Blue Sky** , it doesn’t work ☹

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**Author:** ![Nanoda](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Nanoda](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nanoda)\
**Post date:** [May 1, 2005, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-i-get-chinese-characters-to-display-in-mozilla/301911/5 "2005-05-01T03:43:10Z")

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I think the ‘Languages’ section is to inform the server you’re connecting to as to your preferred language. (ie, you could set up a web site, and users preferring french would see french, english would see english). Not 100% sure on that, but the characters seem correct at amazon.jp, and I don’t have anything selected in there.

If you choose View/Character Encoding, do you see “Japanese ([Shift\_JIS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift-JIS))”? If you don’t, then I’d say the character set you need isn’t installed. Usually when I visit a site with characters I don’t have, a box pops up asking if I want to install it. I don’t know why you haven’t seen this.

[This MS support page](http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;257213) might help.  
As it says, yry going to the Windows Update site and installing multi-language support. If that’s already there… I dunno. 😕