Utilities
Chinese Tools
Character Palette
Chinese Text Converter
Converts plain-text documents between Chinese encodings. Includes a built-in text editor that allows you to edit the documents to be converted, and create new documents.
Update: In OS X 10.4 and above, this tool has been transformed into the "ChineseTextConverterService" located in the /System/Library/Services folder. It functions in the Services menu for Cocoa applications and it is also built into the Chinese input methods.
System Tools
File Name Encoding Repair
OS 8 and OS 9 use Apple's WorldScript encodings to enter and display file names. OS X uses Unicode to enter and display file names. OS 9 converts file names to Unicode for use on OS X, but when the encoding differs from the system default in OS 9 (for example, a Chinese file name on an English system) the conversion to Unicode can be incorrect. This utility corrects many common cases of incorrect conversion. See: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/filenameencodingrepairutility.html
UnicodeChecker
Free. UnicodeChecker allows you to browse the Unicode character set on your machine. For any character, it will tell you the decimal Unicode number, hexadecimal Unicode scalar value, hexadecimal UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 code, Unicode name, and more. You can also install Unihan.txt for direct access to the information from the Unihan database. See: http://www.earthlingsoft.net/UnicodeChecker/
TinkerTool System
Marcel Bresink's TinkerTool System gives you access to advanced system settings and internal maintenance features built into Mac OS X. It allows you to change the language used for system startup and login. This does not affect the language used in the Finder (which you can change in System Preferences... International). See: http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerToolSys.html
ID3Mod
Converts garbled ID3 tags for Chinese MP3 music files in iTunes. See: http://www.sinomac.com/ID3Mod/
Document Tools
Preview
Comes with OS X. Handles Chinese text well. However, Preview jumbles the font MingLiU/PMingLiU (the traditional-Chinese system font in Windows XP and earlier) when it is embedded in PDF documents. The result looks something like this:
There is a simple workaround: Adobe Reader (and Acrobat) handles this font with no problems.
Adobe Reader
Free. Handles Chinese text well, including searches. If the author of a PDF file embeds Chinese fonts in the document, Reader will be able to display and print the document on any system. If the author uses Chinese fonts but does not embed them in the document, then you will need to take two steps in order to view and print the file:
- Use the Custom Installation option during installation of Reader. This allows you to install Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts inside the Reader package.
- To print the file, select the Download Asian Fonts option in the Advanced Print Setup dialog box (requires a PostScript Level 2 or higher printer).
See: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readermain.html
Adobe Acrobat
Handles Chinese text well, including searches. See: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/main.html
VINC
VINC (View, Navigate & Convert) is an integrated disk navigation, document viewing and conversion application allowing users to view and convert MSWord, PDF, AppleWorks, and RTF documents. Supports Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, as well as Central European, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew. Version 1.7 provides the capability of viewing PDF files and converting them into other word processing file formats. See: http://www.recosoft.com/products/vinc/
Fetch
The proper format for the file transfer of documents containing Chinese text is "binary." There are many programs that handle file transfers. One of the best is Fetch, which now supports FTP, SFTP, and FTP with TLS/SSL. Free for educational and non-profit use, shareware for everyone else. See: http://fetchsoftworks.com
Unix Terminal Emulation
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.