Chinese characters interfering with spanish accent marks.

[webmagnets]

When I open some software and some files on my computer, where there should be a vowel with an accent mark, it shows up as a chinese character.

Is there anything I can do to fix this problem?

[randall_flagg]

same problem here，　ｏｎ　ｘｐ　ａｎｄ　ｏｎ　ｍｙ　ｐａｌｍ　ＯＳ．

[malinuo]

Wrong encoding. If you have that problem on a Palm I would guess that you have CJKOS installed. Disable it. Then you can type and read accented characters. You have to enable it again in order to read Chinese. The Palm cannot display accents and Chinese in the same text.

For XP the question is fairly vague, but the answer is certainly the same. Somewhere the program you use has decided that the encoding is one thing (perhaps unicode UTF8 or Chinese GBK or Shift-JIS or something else), but the text pretends to be something different, like Western Latin. You have to find where in the program the encoding is set. It may be in the "open file" dialogue, I suppose, but it depends on the program.

[webmagnets]

It does this mostly in simple programs that don't allow you to change the encoding option.

I have two input methods installed. US-International and Chinese(PRC).

What would you do?

[malinuo]

Does it do it to documents you open, or is it the interface, e.g. labels and menus that go wrong?

What's the origin of the programs? Did you or a friend write them in Visual Basic? Are they Java applications? Are they character based and run in a DOS window?

As far as I remember XP has a setting for "preferred language" in a control panel. If you have that one set to Chinese, that might affect some programs.

[webmagnets]

I fixed it with your help.

I went to control panel - regional and language - advanced tab - language for non-Unicode programs - changed this setting to english.

Now everything displays properly.

Thank you.

[Long Zhiren]

My Yahoo! French language news feeds get confused the same way. Maybe it's because I'm getting Chinese language news feeds too?

Chinese characters are interfering with French accent marks too.

[smalltownfart]

Long Zhiren : you have a slightly different problem, although kinda similar.

The problem is caused by your browser. What operating system are you using?

The browser uses a different setting from the fix that webmagnet used in "control panel - regional and language - advanced tab - language for non-Unicode programs".

The only way you can see both French accented characters and Chinese on the same page is if you use the Unicode encoding. For my yahoo account, I notice that it is using

Big5, so that would explain the problem. Big5 handles 1 single encoding,

while UTF-8 can handle basically everything at the same time.

In the case of Internet Explorer, you can check the encoding the browser is using on any given page by looking at "View-Encoding" from the menu.

If Yahoo supported UTF-8 instead of using Big5 or GB*, you would be OK.