unreadable font

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Level 1

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unreadable font

I usually download some chinese txt file to my computer and export it to pdf file using pages. However, some of the file when I open it is unreadable like this:

My method is copy the file and transfer it to a PC and using microsoft word to determine the font for me and automatically change it to readable chinese character. I find it is very annoying and I want pages to do this for me rather than using other PC( that's make no sense!). Is there any method for pages to automactically change to readable font for me? ( i search online and some people say is about the UTF-8 problems but I am not sure)

Pages-OTHER, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3)

Posted on May 28, 2013 2:26 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,916 points

May 28, 2013 3:08 AM in response to yellowKat

It is not the fonts, but an encoding problem. It your file is in one of the various old Chinese encodings, you may have to convert it to Unicode before Pages can display it correctly. The app TextEdit lets you try various encodings from the Open dialogue and then you can resave in Unicode or copy/paste into Pages.

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Answer 2

May 28, 2013 6:16 AM in response to yellowKat

As Tom says. Beats me why some people are still using the old encoded Chinese text.

Word for Windows does an excellent job of opening and resaving to Unicode which is what should have been used in the first place. You could run it in a Virtual Windows on your Mac several of the Windows virtualisers let you copy and paste or even drag files across to OSX.

Peter

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