Who has experience with generating chinese characters on a computer (Macintosh OS X)?

Factual Questions
1

Here is the situation I am running into.

I am going to be writing letters to government officials in Beijing, China. I have been given the addresses in chinese characters, in several forms:

a) A .PNG (graphics) file that I could use to print on a label
b) In an Adobe Acrobat .PDF file, as text in a transcription using Latin alphabet (I assume a Pinyin transcription)
c) In the Adobe Acrobat .PDF file, as text using chinese characters

The text in c) and in a) (the .PDF and the .PNG) are identical (at least to my untrained eye). The text in a) is guaranteed to be correct; therefore I assume that the text in c) is displaying correctly in the .PDF. So, since I have chinese fonts installed on my Macintosh, I copy and paste the text from c) into a new Unicode text document, selecting a font that has Unicode chinese characters.

Problem:
When I copy and paste to the Unicode text document, about half of the characters show correctly, but the other half don’t (they show with the glyph representing an unknown character). My guess is that my Unicode font doesn’t include those characters, or else the .PDF file is not using a Unicode character set? I tried looking inside my Unicode font using a “character map”-type program to find the missing chinese characters, but it is very tedious since I know nothing about chinese.

My questions:

  1. Is there an easy way to find out what the Unicode number would be for a chinese character?
  2. Does anyone know what font .PDF files use for chinese characters?
  3. Is there an easy way to find out what the chinese characters are that correspond to a pinyin transcription of a Chinese word? Keep in mind that some of these words are probably place names or person’s names, that wouldn’t be found in a dictionary. For example, I would like a website where I type in “Beijing” or “Jingsheng” or something like that, and the site will show me the chinese characters that correspond to that pinyin transcription. This might at least give me a clue. Whatever the site would show me, I can compare to my .PNG file to verify correctness. And if the site shows me something correct, I am hoping I could copy and paste the chinese characters into my Unicode text file.
2

copy/paste the characters in here, and I’ll tell you.

mwahahahahahahahaha

3

Is that a serious offer? I can’t tell because of the diabolical laughter. If I showed you a chinese character, would you be able to tell me what Unicode number it corresponds to?

4

When I need to do something with Chinese characters, I usually go to www.mandarintools.com and use the tools there.

5

I’ve seen similar problems on PCs. In those cases the PDF had the fonts embedded. You need to find out what font is being used and install that on your Mac. How you do that, I leave to the Mac experts.

6

Thank you Monty. I had found that site before I posted, but I didn’t see any tool there that would help me in my situation.

Quartz: I’m sure that the .PDF has the fonts embedded. This would not be a Mac question, more of an Adobe question - how can you tell the names of the fonts embedded in a .PDF document?

7

On a PC, it’s File | Properties | Fonts tab.

8

No, because to copy/paste it would require you have the correct unicode. You might actually wanna take a screenshot, and have some doper post the correct hanzi for it.