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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
    – Jader Dias
    Nov 16, 2010 at 12:26
  • My Windows is in Portuguese-BR and it doesn't work even if I paste the text from Google translate
    – Jader Dias
    Nov 16, 2010 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, 2010 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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When the Chinese characters appear as boxes, you can go to Control Panel and change the System Locale setting to China PRC. Restart your computer to activate the change and the Chinese characters will appear properly

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  • "rendering fonts" is a bit different from "changing the locale of the system". to show some xyz chars on the screen one needs a font supporting the right glyphs. with a font lacking the needed glyphs nothing will change (look-alike-wise) when you change the locale.
    – akira
    Oct 26, 2012 at 6:07

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