Help! My TextEdit won't display chinese characters or accents.

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Level 1

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Help! My TextEdit won't display chinese characters or accents.

In the first case it just shows random symbols, in the second case it replaces the accented words with symbols. Now, I can write characters and accents, but I can't view them in a made file. I work a lot with subtitles and I don't understand why I can't view them correctly. I have chinese as one of my main languages, so why is this happening? What can I do if I want to open and edit an srt file or ssa file that's in chinese or spanish??

I appreciate your input, I'm kinda desperate.

MacBook, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Sep 5, 2013 7:10 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,252 points

Sep 5, 2013 7:36 AM in response to yaozilan

yaozilan wrote:

I can write characters and accents, but I can't view them in a made file.

That normally indicates that you are trying to open the file in an encoding different than the one in which it was saved.

When you create a file with Chinese or other characters, use UTF-8 as the encoding when saving, and use File > Open to make sure you have the same one. The defaults can be set in TextEdit Preferences. Do not use "automatic".

If you get an srt file from elsewhere, you may need to test different encodings if you do not know what the author used. Open the file via File > Open and not by just double-clicking on it, so you can control the encoding used.

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Answer 2

yaozilan Author

Level 1

0 points

Sep 5, 2013 8:18 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanks a lot! It worked when I chose to open it with chinese Mac encoding 🙂 I will try later what works for the spanish accents. Thanks so much.

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