How To Read Chinese on Internet
If you are using a non-Chinese version Windows 9x/NT, there are a couple of things that you can do. If all you want is to be able to read Chinese in your browser, you can download and install Chinese fonts on your computer from Microsoft. If you want to use Chinese in other applications, you need to install additional Chinese supporting software, such as NJ Star and Magicwin. The former provides a more comprehensive solution while the latter is much more smaller but only let you view Chinese.
If you are using Windows 2000, good news for you. Windows 2000 supports multilanguage natively. All you need to do is just go to control-panel and in the regional options, change the language settings for the system to simplified Chinese and set it as default. After reboot, you will be able to read Chinese in most applications.
Apple has a Chinese Language Kit for MacOS. It is included in Mac OS 8.6 and above. Mac OS 8.6 does not support Chinese input while Mac OS 9.0 and above fully supports Chinese input, viewing and printing. So if you are still using Mac OS 8.5 or below, you had better upgrade you operating system to 9.0 or above. Be sure to tell the install program that you need to install the language kit because it is not default. If you are using Mac OS 9.x and you cannot see Chinese, you just need to install the Chinese Language Kit from Mac OS CD.
If it is not convenient for you to upgrade the system, chances are you will have trouble. There is a program called Elixir which is somewhat similar to NJStar in Windows but much less functional. In addition, there is a telnet program called MacBlue which allows you view and input Chinese in a terminal window. If neither of these two software solves your problem, you had better move...
Apple just released its new operating system Mac OS X. It is basically a BSD Unix system with a nice interface called Aqua. MacBlue will work under its classics environment. If you have certain X Window system installed, you can also try CXterm, which is a Chinese terminal emulator for X Window. OS X comes with chinese fonts and you can view Chinese web sites using IE 5.1 or some other browsers.
Here I should really say Chinese support in X window because X window is the standard graphical interface on most unix systems (but not OS X. You have to install X by yourself if you are using OS X). Netscape and Mozilla are two best browsers available for most systems. Good news is they both support displaying Chinese characters. The bad news is to get them work, you need some knowledge of unix to get Chinese working on your system. You can download a CXterm package from our website which includes a Chinese version of xterm and some Chinese fonts. To get netscape working, all you need is actually just the fonts. Under a terminal, type following command to extract the files from the package first:
%tar vxzf cxterm5.1p1.tar.gz
Enter the directory, type
%./config.sh
to compile and install CXterm following the on screen instructions. If you do not have root previlege and would like to install the Chinese fonts, use following commands to add the fonts into your system:
%xset +fp /yout/font/dir;xset fp rehash
You may need to type this commands every time you login unless you ask system administrator to add the fonts or the font path into your X window system.
For More information, please visit the excellent website about how to read Chinese on Internet here.