I need to be able to view chinese characers with firefox, as I will be hosting web content that will include mandarin.

A random site: http://www.cpexhibition.com/mainpage/chtpwb5.htm

The chracters, which I assume are mandarin character do not come up normally and instead appear as boxes.

Is there a language plugin for firefox?

On the mozilla website they have, apparently, a chinese browser, but I don't want to change to a strictly chinese browser.

Under preferences you can added languages. I added all of the chinese options (singapore, twanese, etc).

Any advice would be great.

You now mate, took the link to check if I had the same problem and I dont. Now, I dont have any special extra fonts installed in my FC3 and Firefox. Maybe you did a customized install and missed these?

thanks for the response...well, it's not encoding right or something.


I decided to instal netscape. I changed the supported languages to mandarin, just like i did in firefox, but it actually worked right away for netscape.


i installed the chinese version of firefox, in a seperate directory...yeah., what a joke that was. all it did was make the language default to chinese instead of me installing the english version and just adding chinese language to the language list...

You know, I think its not so much up to Firefox to display correctly the mandarin font if is not correctly set in your system. Not sure.

well, I wasn't sure if it was a fedora issue or not. like, i thought maybe fonts needed to be installed or something, but am now strictly/mostly leaning toward it being a firefox issue and not related to fedora. I have the option to choose chinese encoding on firefox, but it doesn't work. just little boxes come up, which made me belive it needed fonts from fedora install or perhaps firefox, so I also installed some kde-isomethingorother.rpm that looked to be a fonts package, but it still don't work. I also installed the chinese version of firefox, which as I said, appears to be a complete waste of server space and very misleading as to what it actually does, though I could be worng.

Netscape worked just fine, and with no additional software needed to make it work. Maybe netscape installs its own fonts and doesn't require fedora to have them (a good software development decision).

So, if you have fedora/firefox combo and it works, then it is quite a mystery to me what else i need to do to get firefox working. The add/remove application feature for kde/fedora is barely adequate and not friendly at all, so if there is some package to be installed, then i'm not seeing it....

what distro are you running?

oh, I should mention that one of my favorite things about firefox now (that i've changed setting, even though i've changed them back), is that it crashes when I go to sites that have chinese characters on them...oh so much fun.

Yes same problem. I can't get Firefox to display chinese characters. I tried switching languages in browser settings and still shows only boxes. I am in China and also need to figure out how to make Open Office work in Fedora 3 english language.

hmmm...I'd have to get back with you on the open office thing. maybe if you change your regional settings under the control center that'll do it.

for some reason I could never get certain types of character combos to display properly. However, while I was able to view everything perfectly with netscape, I had the same character that couldn't be interpreted by IE. I decided to just make little gif files out of the characters that won't show and insert them as images into the html...that fixes my hosting issue, but not browsing with firefox or IE (sometimes).