How can I make Chinese characters show in IE8 without forcing compatibility mode?

Question

All the solutions for this issue say to use <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" />, which works because it forces the browser to render in compatibility view (i.e. as if it were IE7), but then the characters don't display when the user is actually using IE7 (or a number of other browsers). Instead, I see squares.

Anyone else encounter this? How did you deal with it?

Answer 1

Setting the following font-family in CSS worked for me:

font-family: Arial Unicode MS, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;

Because in this case, Arial Unicode MS is the only available font for Chinese Simplified.

Update: Thanks to Spike, the order of the first two fonts was wrong. Corrected.

Answer 2

it's not an encoding problem. The issue is plainly seen on this page, which has the correct utf-8 meta tag: http://www.jp41.com/internet-explorer/chinese/.

The problem is that IE8's default font for Chinese is set to nothing!

Here's the fix.

1. Push alt to bring up the file menu.

2. Go to /tools/internet options/fonts/

3. Set the "Language Script" to Chinese Simplified

4. Select the only option - Arial Unicode MS

5. Accept the changes- problem solved.

This oversight affects Chinese Traditional, Korean, Japanese, and probably most other asian languages.

Image if issue being resolved:
http://www.robertpate.net/blog/wp-content/media/ie8-chinese-bug-fullsize.jpg