Simplified Chinese Characters

[TechWriter2020]

Hi Everybody

How do I insert Simplified Chinese characters in to a manual? I've tried word and .txt docs, then, but Framemaker doesn't recoginze them: it just displays a series of very angry confused questions marks. 

Thanks! 

[Winfried Reng]

Hi,

Which font do you use? Does your font have these characters? You could apply the same font as in Word.

Best regards

Winfried

[TechWriter2020]

I'm using Arial for English.

[Bob_Niland]

What version of Framemaker? (it would need to be FM8 or later for Unicode).

Is the source for the text encoded as Big5, GB18030 or Unicode?

What font or typeface?

If you have a font that populates the codepoints used, recent versions of FM have, at:
Input » Character, either
Character Palette applet for picking them, or
Hex Input for entering known character code points. 

[TechWriter2020]

FM 2019

Not sure how to answer your second question

Font I'm using (English) is Arial

OK. I know of the character pallette, but am not sure (stepwise) how to code those characters in.

[Stefan-Gentz]

You need to assign a font that actually has Chinese Characters. Arial is not one of them, that's why it only shows question marks.

Try SimSun or some other Chinese font.

[Bob_Niland]

re: OK. I know of the character pallette, but am not sure (stepwise) how to code those characters in.

For more than a few characters, the principal use of the FM Character Palette (or the Windows Character Map) might be to confirm that the intended font covers the glyph range (code points) of interest.

If the Asian source text is already available, copy & paste (special, plain) would be the usual route. It would be important to verify not only that the target text appears as those same characters, but also that it appears as precisely those same characters. Non-romance languages had various solutions in the pre-Unicode era, and not all will just copy and paste, even with a target font that notionally supports the script.

[TechWriter2020]

Sorry. I was under a deadline and just added a screenshot of the Simplified Chinese. Thanks.