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My notepad won't show chinese characters, while other programs will. Why is that? How to fix it?

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Notepad is one of the most basic text editors there is, however, if you go to save as and change the document type to unicode when you save, it should be able to save the Chinese characters.

As for display - I am no expert in Chinese, I just went to Google Translate and copied and pasted a chunk of text, and put it in Notepad - not having any problems here.

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Now I remember. Since text files have no metadata the encoding when opening a file is detected by an educated guess. So if you write bush hid the facts and save it as ANSI, when you open it again in Windows XP/NT/2000 it will display chinese characters because it thinks it's unicode – Vam'çá Nov 16 '10 at 12:26
My Windows is in Portuguese-BR and it doesn't work even if I paste the text from Google translate – Vam'çá Nov 16 '10 at 12:32
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@Vam'çá: It looks like the default font Notepad uses (Lucida Console) doesn't include Chinese characters. If you paste Chinese characters into Notepad, they will appear as boxes, but the correct character codes are stored internally. You can change Notepad's display font using Format → Font. My computer has three fonts with Chinese characters, MingLiU, MS Hei, and MS Song, maybe your computer has them too. – Bavi_H Nov 17 '10 at 2:01
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As Bavi_H noted the issue is that the default font (Lucida Console) doesn't have chinese characters. He said

If you paste Chinese characters into Notepad, they will appear as boxes, but the correct character codes are stored internally. You can change Notepad's display font using Format → Font. My computer has three fonts with Chinese characters, MingLiU, MS Hei, and MS Song, maybe your computer has them too.

I noted that Times New Roman works for me.

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