Internet
Web Browsers
Sites that use frames sometimes need to have their text encoding set manually for each frame. The trick is to click in the frame before you set the encoding. You may or may not have to repeat this for each frame.
Apple Safari
Firefox
Unicode-savvy. Mozilla is an open-source project, begun in 1998 when Netscape made their source code public. The idea is that developers (like Netscape/AOL) can take the Mozilla code and adapt it to their own projects. Firefox is Mozilla's own browser built with this code.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
Camino
Camino is a browser for Mac OS X that incorporates the Unicode-savvy Gecko web-page rendering engine from the Mozilla project. Other parts of Camino, like menus, dialogs, and tool bars are built using Mac OS X Cocoa technologies.
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/
OmniWeb
Unicode-savvy. OmniWeb uses the same open source page-rendering engine as Safari. Page titles and bookmarks in Chinese are all displayed properly. To reset the encodings of web pages, add the Character Encoding pop-up menu to the Toolbar (using Customize Toolbar... in the Browser menu).
OmniWeb includes a text editor used to view the sources of web pages, as well to create and edit HTML documents [use File > New Source Document].
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/
Opera
Unicode-savvy. Includes a built-in POP/IMAP email client, along with an IRC chat client. Handles Chinese well, including page titles and bookmarks.
iCab
WorldScript-savvy, versions available for System 7.1 and above. Make sure that the correct Chinese fonts are configured for the Chinese encodings in the Fonts category of Preferences.
Email Clients
Apple Mail
Thunderbird
Unicode-savvy. Free, open-source. Part of the Mozilla project. Set the encoding of any message via Character Coding in the View menu.
http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/
GNUMail
Unicode-savvy. Free, open-source. For GNUstep (for Linux, or FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) and Cocoa (Mac OS X 10.2 and above).
http://www.collaboration-world.com/
GyazMail
Unicode-savvy. GyazMail automatically sets the encoding of outgoing messages based on content. To manually set the encoding of an outgoing message, use the Encoding pop-up menu, which you can add to the Toolbar by choosing View > Customize Toolbar... when editing a message. Note that the tools available for the Toolbar differ according to type of window. The Encoding pop-up menu is available only for the message editor.
http://www.gyazsquare.com/gyazmail/
PowerMail
PowerMail 4.2 and above is Unicode-savvy.
Microsoft Entourage
Entourage 2004 is Unicode-savvy for the Basic Multilingual Plane. Set the encoding of any message via Character Set in the Format menu. In addition to email, Entourage includes a calendar and address book.
Web Publishing Tools
Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver 8 and above is Unicode-savvy. Creative Suite 3 requires OS X 10.4 and above.
http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/
Freeway
Freeway 4 is Unicode-savvy, OS X 10.2.8 and above.
CSS Editors
- CSSEdit ~ Unicode-savvy, OS X 10.4 and above.
- Style Master ~ Unicode-savvy, OS X 10.3 and above.
File Transfer Tools
- Fetch ~ FTP/SFTP (File Transfer Protocol/Secure File Transfer Protocol). Free for educational and non-profit use, shareware for everyone else.
- Fugu ~ SFTP. Free, developed at the University of Michigan. Provides a graphical front end to the SFTP support built into the Unix foundation of Mac OS X.
- Transmit ~ FTP/SFTP. In Preferences: Files, you should remove the extensions you use for files containing Chinese text from the list of ASCII text formats, which will ensure that those file types always transfer as binary (the proper format for files containing Chinese text). Binary is the default for all file types except those on this list. Or you can use the Mode > Binary command in the Transfer menu.
- RBrowser ~ FTP/SFTP. Binary is the default format for uploads, and the proper format for files containing Chinese text. If you encounter problems, use the FTP Transfer Type > Binary command in the File menu.
Unix Terminal Emulators
There are two levels of Chinese support that must be addressed. The first is in the Unix terminal emulation software, which needs to be set up to emulate a localized Chinese Unix terminal in order to handle double-byte Chinese character set encodings (as opposed to handling Chinese with Unicode). See the entries below for some details.
The second level is in the Unix operating system. The shell environment variables have to be set to the corresponding Chinese locale (when connecting to a localized Chinese server, for example). You can either type in the commands manually at the command line or add them to your ~/.cshrc file. Both terminal emulators start up with the default shell (tcsh, for example). When tcsh starts, it looks for and reads a number of initialization files. One of those files is ~/.cshrc. Placing setenv commands in the ~/.cshrc file ensures that the locale is set at startup and saves you the trouble of manually typing the commands every time.
Commands for the tcsh shell and Traditional Chinese locale (Big Five character set):
setenv LC_CTYPE zh_TW.Big5
setenv LANG zh_TW.Big5
Commands for the tcsh shell and Simplified Chinese locale (GB 2312 character set):
setenv LC_CTYPE zh_CN.EUC
setenv LANG zh_CN.EUC
To upload or download files containing Chinese, you must set the FTP transfer mode to binary format before you enter the get or put commands.
Apple Terminal
OS X only, in the /Applications/Utilities folder. This discussion is based on Terminal 1.4.1 in OS X 10.3.
UTF-8 is the default setting, and you can enter Unicode Chinese characters using the Character Palette without changing any settings. Other standard Chinese character set encodings are available in Terminal > Window Settings... Display, and thus Terminal shell windows can be set up to emulate localized Chinese Unix terminals.
iTerm
OS X only. iTerm is an open-source project focused on multilingual support, including Unicode and all standard East Asian encodings. Change the encoding in Preferences > Shell settings to set up iTerm to emulate a localized Chinese Unix terminal.