How can I make Chinese characters show in IE8 without forcing compatibility mode?

Question

All the solutions for this issue say to use , which works because it forces the browser t

Answer 1

it's not an encoding problem. The issue is plainly seen on this page, which has the correct utf-8 meta tag: http://www.jp41.com/internet-explorer/chinese/.

The problem is that IE8's default font for Chinese is set to nothing!

Here's the fix.

1. Push alt to bring up the file menu.

2. Go to /tools/internet options/fonts/

3. Set the "Language Script" to Chinese Simplified

4. Select the only option - Arial Unicode MS

5. Accept the changes- problem solved.

This oversight affects Chinese Traditional, Korean, Japanese, and probably most other asian languages.

Image if issue being resolved:
http://www.robertpate.net/blog/wp-content/media/ie8-chinese-bug-fullsize.jpg

Answer 2

Setting the following font-family in CSS worked for me:

font-family: Arial Unicode MS, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

Because in this case, Arial Unicode MS is the only available font for Chinese Simplified.

Update: Thanks to Spike, the order of the first two fonts was wrong. Corrected.

Answer 3

This sounds like an encoding problem to me. Chinese characters are probably being output using UTF-8 encoding, but the browser is not being told that and is defaulting to another encoding.

Try including this line:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

That should force the browser into UTF-8 encoding. (This line is included in the site linked in the referenced question: http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/china-chine/index.aspx?lang=eng, which works fine in my IE8 and defaults to UTF-8.)

Note that the original question states that this is actually a separate issue entirely, involving IE8 relying on installed Windows language packs, while IE7 and earlier did not.

---

Alternatively as a quick-hack fix, you can just use IE conditionals to only present the meta tag to IE8 browsers.

<!--[if IE 8]>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<![endif]-->

IE7 should ignore this line, causing it to render normally.