Go Home | Go Back to Tips Page How to read Chinese Websites on a Macintosh computerI suppose you are using MacOS 8.5 or higher. I have no experience on using Chinese on MacOS 7 or below. I test three popular browsers for the Macintosh: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, and iCab. First, you need the Chinese fonts installed on your Mac. There are two fonts to be installed: Simplified Chinese (Beijing font) and Traditional Chinese (Taipei font). You need the MacOS Installation CD-ROM to install the Chinese fonts. Insert the MacOS CD, do a customized installation, choose the Multilingual support, Simplified and Traditional Chinese options. After the customized installation, the fonts are on your system now. Then, you need to configure your browsers. Open your browsers, in the Edit menu, you will find the Options item. Click to open it. Find the font/language settings, assign the Beijing font for Simplified Chinese, and Taipei for Traditional Chinese. Choose OK to finish. When you are visiting a Chinese site, you may need to change the text encoding to GB2312 for Simplified Chinese and Big-5 for Traditional Chinese. Now you should be able to view Chinese on your Mac. Happy surfing! Using Chinese TelnetSometimes you may need to use Chinese while telneting. Unlike on the Windows PC, you don't need a separate Chinese platform: there is a very good Chinese Telnet client for Macintosh, you can use it on English MacOS directly, no need to install a Chinese platform first. It contains Chinese fonts and input methods itself. This software is called MacBlue Telnet, you can download it from ftp://ftp.ifcss.org. If you have difficulties to get a copy, download it directly from here. You may need to download StuffIt Expander first to decompress the .sit file. Good luck. After fetching and installing the MacBlue Telnet, you must notice that the default settings are for Traditional Chinese. To connected to a host with Simplified Chinese, you need to change the HanZi font from Traditional Chinese to Simplified Chinese in the Terminal menu. To input Chinese, press option+number keys to choose the input methods, it has both popular Simplified and Traditional Chinese input methods. To change back to the English input, press option+spacebar. Other Chinese applicationsIf you want to do Chinese word procesing on Mac, you need the Chinese Language Kit. It comes with the MacOS 9, but not included in the MacOS 8.5/8.6, so you need to buy it separately if you are using MacOS 8.x. Therefore, it is a good idea to upgrade to OS 9 if you are really want to do Chinese word processing on the Macintosh computers. You can get other nifty feathers lacking in the MacOS 8.x, such as Sherlock 2 and the voice verification. |