missing characters

[goldie]

can anyone explain why sometimes, certain characters don't display even though they obviously should be there? i can view characthers, but occasionally, one or two just don't appear...why is that?

[gougou]

certain characters

which characters?

should be there?

should be where?

I think you need to tell us a bit more before you can expect a reply.

[笨笨德]

If you mean you have a page of chinese chars and there are a few empty boxes instead of a character... then is is possible that your font just doesn't have that particular glyph. given that there are a huge amounts of glyphs to cover in chinese this is pretty much inevitable at some stage...

The Arial unicode font commonly used on micro$oft platforms has 50k+ glyphs but that includes all the other CJK languages too. Most chinese fonts have around 15k glyphs.

Perhaps you could convert your file to Big5 or GB2312 encoding, as older fonts based on these encodings generally have better glyph coverage...

加油

[trevelyan]

Chinese character encoding is a mess. There are multiple "Guobiao" encodings and no-one really differentiates between the two in practice. GB13080 is one of the bigger extended set that uses the same encoding conventions as GB2312 -- it parses like GB2312 but contains some characters the earlier version doesn't recognize.

So when you have issues where a single character doesn't resolve, you're usually dealing with non-Unicode data processing, and cases where different software applications are tossing data back and forth and lying about their encoding. Publishers like Xinhua also do this sort of thing -- they claim to be in GB2312 when they really aren't. Most browsers are good at defaulting to really open settings these days, but if you're developing a software application and have to handle GB2312, try setting the encoding of the document explicitly to GB18030 and the issue may go away.

[goldie]

for example, on this forum, someone asked in another thread about the meaning of this phrase 不以為然. i knew that the 3rd char should be 為, but it wasn't there. i couldn't see it. that is what i meant.

[gougou]

Then it has to do with simplified/traditional, as all the characters you can see are part of the simplified set; the one you can't see, however, is traditional.

Maybe you have only simplified fonts installed?

[goldie]

i've just looked to check and apparently i have 3 traditional and 3 simplified fonts installed.so that's not it...

[goldie]

it's happened AGAIN in this forum, see the thread in this section about writing love letters, the author claims that all he can say/write in chinese is 'wo ai ni', but i can't see the 'ai' char! can anyone else? i went to MDBG to write a responce to that posting and tried to select the char qin, as in qin ai de from the simplified list, but my PC wouldn't display the 'qin' ARRRRRGH, why?