One for the geeks out there:

Chinese software on my computer (Win7, Chinese language support installed, system locale set to Chinese Simplified (PRC)) still shows some weird text. The question marks instead of Chinese characters were eliminated by switching the system locale to Chinese.

Yet, software such as Pipi player will still show things like "ÌÒ»¨Ð¡ÃÃ" which are absolutely incomprehensible to me. Why isn't it showing Chinese characters?

Usually if ??? marks show up then it means the font being used doesn't support those characters in Chinese.

The weird text means the wrong character encoding is being used. In language support there should be a setting for non-unicode programs. I'm currently using the Chinese version of windows 7 so I'm not sure what it's called in English.

I believe it's the same place you changed the system locale, but on the last tab. Mine is called 管理, on the bottom half you can change the default encoding used for non-unicode programs. Change it to Simplified Chinese(maybe called GB18030, or something like that). reboot and see what happens.

If the above doesn't make sense it's because I need to sleep. I'll double check on an English version of windows tomorrow.

Hey,

Thanks for you answer. But I said the ??? had already been resolved. They're not the problem. The process you describe is what I'd done before: setting the system locale to Simplified Chinese (PRC). I have rebooted after and indeed most of the menus don't show any more ???.

However, programs will still display text bits (not as much in menu elements as in text elements, such as the user agreements during software installation) that looks like the following gibberish: "ÌÒ»¨Ð¡ÃÃ".

Not sure how to fix that.

fisken

Yeah, I checked today and I see it does say system locale. Which system locale did you set? Chinese has various encodings that aren't compatible. I've never used Pipi player, guess when I have time I can look at it.

Another thing is are you sure it's not a compatiblity issue with Windows XP software and Windows 7? Still lots of software in China targeted only for Windows XP unfortunately... Try changing the compatibility mode to XP and see what happens. If your computer has enough ram you could install the Chinese version of XP in vm player or virtual box...

I'm not a geek but I have a lot of sw that symply cannot run on my english version of windows 7 (showing the kind of characters you mentioned) but work perfectly on the chinese one, so I recommend to install the two versions of windows 7 on your pc and maybe that should fix all issues...

Ouyang, that's it! I never thought it could be a windows version compatibility problem. Running Pipi in compatibility mode solved all the weird character problems, wonder if it will also deal with the locale problem. Cheers!

Wait, no, that didn't work after all. Strange, the characters are back, though I'm certain I saw proper Chinese once where the original odd characters were...