Dear Chinese 131 Students,
To view the Chinese characters and Pinyin fonts on the Chinese course pages, you'll need to have some sort of Chinese language support installed on your computer. A good program available for download over the internet is NJStar Internet Viewer 1.80. If you also wish to be able to type Chinese in your documents, you can download the NJStar Communicator 2.2 instead. It contains the functionality of the viewer, as well as many other features. These products can be downloaded and tried out for free. If you pay for the license, they will provide free support and better-looking fonts.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 and above also provide support for Chinese and other languages. First you need to acquire Internet Explorer, and then download Microsoft's Global IME product, which allows you to type Chinese characters in documents. When you download the Global IME, you can also choose to download a language pack at the same time. Choose Simplified Chinese.
To view the Pinyin fonts used on the Chinese course pages, download the Chinese Pinyin fonts designed by Professor Chin-Chuan Cheng. (You will have to scroll down the page a bit to find the downloads). After downloading and unzipping the font, install them using the following process. Go to the Control Panel (Under Settings on the Start Menu) and double-click the Fonts icon. Then, go to the File menu and select Install new font. In the box that opens up, go to the bottom and select the folder into which you unzipped the Chinese Pinyin fonts. When you do so, you should be able to install the new fonts.
Good Luck!
Should you have any questions or comments, please contact Sue-mei Wu