[thelist] Building a CMS which handles the Chinese language

[Isaac Forman]

Hi,

Is there anyone here with much experience in building Web sites using
alternative character sets (ie, Chinese = Big5, etc)? Specifically, I am
looking at adding multiple-language versions of content to a CMS. I have
read that there are two character sets (Big5 and GBsomething) that handle
the Traditional and Simplified character forms. Aside from that, I've not
been able to find any more details.

I suspect that languages like French, German, etc will interact with
databases/form elements easily enough because (AFAIK) they use the same
characters. What other languages will play happily in this fashion?

How does it work with other languages? Can you copy and paste Chinese
characters into form elements? Can you insert/select from the database?

Viewing source of a page which shows Chinese characters, gives strange
characters from a standard character set. If I view those in a specific
font, would they display correctly? Here's an example of the "strange"
characters (I imagine that they're just extended/non-standard characters
from the standard character set - is that correct?).

	ʵµÂÑÇÓű­¶ÔÊÖÇåË®¶ÓʵÁ¦½Òµ× ÒÁÀʹھüËø¶¨½ð±­


(Having searched thelist archives, the only thread about Chinese Web pages
spoke of the "solution" being to use GIF text displaying the characters.)

I would greatly appreciate any advice/examples/tutorials, etc.


Thanks,

isaac

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