Problem displaying Chinese characters

[Zerosum]

I was having difficulties getting downloaded Chinese subtitles to display
properly in avi files. I finally managed to solve that problem using
BSPlayer, all the other apps I tried just gave me gibberish.

But that's not what I'm asking for help with here. There's something I don't
understand. I downloaded the Chinese subtitles from a Chinese website. The
subtitle filetype is srt. However, when I open the subtitle file in Notepad,
all I see are nonsense characters that look like this: ÕâÊÇÄãÃÇÄܼ¯ºÃµÄ°®ºÃ

But when I open the same srt subtitle file in Word, I get a File Conversion
options window asking me to choose one of the following:

1 Windows (Default) 2 MS-DOS 3 Other encoding (choose
Chinese Simplified (GB2312))

Choosing the 'Other encoding' option properly displays the Chinese characters

My question: why don't the Chinese characters display properly when I open
the srt file in Notepad? Why does Word have to 'convert' the file for the
Chinese characters to display propery? When the file is open in Notepad, even
changing the default font to a Chinese Font doesn't help - the characters
then display as square boxes.

My XP system-default language is English, but I have system-wide language
support enabled for both traditional and simplified Chinese in the Regional
and Language Options section of the WindowsXP Control Panel, and I have never
had any problems viewing or typing Chinese into Word, Notepad, or my browser.
XP will allow me to give files Chinese names. I have installed additional
simplified and traditional Chinese fonts in the Fonts folder.

If I copy Chinese text from the web, I can paste it into a .txt file and
save it. So what is it about these Chinese srt files that they will not
display properly when opened in Notepad? I assume these subtitle files were
originally created by someone who had Chinese as the default OS language on
his computer; and when I open these files in Notepad on a Chinese firiend's
computer who has Chinese as the default system language, the files correctly
display in Chinese, so why not on my computer?

Please note that I am not trying to 'fix' Notepad, I merely wish to
understand why the file won't display properly, as I think this is the key to
solving other related problems.

Thanks

 

[grammatim]

Before Unicode, there were competing encodings of CJK, and maybe the
source of your subtitles is using one of those.

 

[Zerosum]

But then why do the subtitle files correctly display the Chinese characters
when opened in Notepad on a Windows XP computer that has Chinese as the
default system language (as is the case with my friend), but not display on
my computer even tho I have enabled support for Chinese in Regional and
Language Options?

 

[grammatim]

Within Chinese support, there are different "encodings" of the
characters -- just as some "encodings" let you see accented letters in
email and others don't. The sender and receiver have to have their
systems set to the same "encoding." These days, Unicode is becoming
the world-wide standard, but older CJK systems (perhaps especially
ones from Hong Kong) may still use older encodings. Somewhere in your
downloading setup there's a place to specify the encoding used in any
particular message (but that's not a Word matter).

 

[Zerosum]

Thanks for the reply.

That makes sense, and it would seem to imply that my Chinese friend can read
these srt files opend directly in Notepad on his system because Notepad in a
Chinese XP OS has the native ability to read a greater variety of encodings
than Notepad on an English XP OS that has had Chinese language support
enabled via Regional and Language Options.

I assume this is also the reason why some of the Chinese language emails I
receive are gibberish; i.e, that email was encoded with something other than
unicode.

 

[grammatim]

Depending on what email system you use, you should have a setting
somewhere to tell it which encoding to use, so that you can read the
Chinese in whichever format it comes to you. (In Internet Explorer,
it's under the Page menu, and the only option for Chinese Traditional
is Big5, which is pre-Unicode. There are three for Chinese Simplified
but I don't know the difference among them.)

I can read the Chinese spam I get regularly (not that i can read
Chinese), and the other day I even got one in Japanese! (Never one in
Korean, though.)