My PC cannot view Chinese characters  

I transferred some of my chinese documents to my PC just now. Some of them are okay, while some of them got their titles all messed up (I'm talking about 500+ messed up documents. All of the messed up documents came from the same zip files if that's going to help).


Naturally, I googled and found out that if you change your system locale to China in the Region and Language tabs, you can solve the problem. Unfortunately, not for my case



I also unhide all the fonts in my Fonts folder (somebody says that'll help), but the problem persists.



I also added Chinese Language to my keyboard to see if it can help, but that also didn't work. So.. anyone any suggestion?



My 500+ files

Not sure if this will help.....................
Right click at one of the "messed up" Chinese doc > click Encoding > click More > select one of the options boxed in RED.
There are 2 boxes in red.

davidhk said:

Not sure if this will help.....................
Right click at one of the "messed up" Chinese doc > click Encoding > click More > select one of the options boxed in RED.
There are 2 boxes in red.

I right-clicked, but there was no 'Encoding' option on the dropdown menu.

Sorry, in that case, I have no solution for you.

I apologize.

davidhk said:

Sorry, in that case, I have no solution for you.

I apologize.

Oh no need to apologize. You are too kind

dalchina said:

Hi, Simplified Chinese is ok on my English (UK) language PC with no particular action.

You've referred to files from one source. What happens with files from another source?

And can you view the files satisfactorily on another PC?

In what way are the titles 'messed up' - can you post an example?
Is it only the titles that are affected or the content too?

For interest here's an old post on this sort of topic - only a workaround which shouldn't be necessary.
Corrupted Chinese Fonts in Windows 8 | xianyou

@davidhk - I think your context menu is that of your browser - not sure how that helps with titles of files not rendered correctly in explorer..?

I just checked all the zip files that I had just transferred. About 5-6 of the zip files have this problem.


I also have the same files on my old laptop (Windows 7) and whilst they do have similar problem at first, they all got solved after I unhide all the fonts and change my region to China.


That didn't work for Windows 10 however

dalchina said:

Hi, that's rather more than 5-6 files...
Nor is it quite the sort of pattern you see if a program isn't unicode compatible, for example.

Perhaps (from your Win 7 laptop) you can post a couple of files as attachments whose title is corrupted in Win 10 as an example - they could be empty, just the titles.

Have you tried the workaround I posted?

I tried, but it still didn't work.


And the insides are okay, the contents are in perfect chinese. Just the titles, which is pretty frustrating because there are literally hundreds of them that has this problem.

dalchina said:

Perhaps (from your Win 7 laptop) you can post a couple of files as attachments whose title is corrupted in Win 10 as an example - they could be empty, just the titles.

Oh. and my Win 7 laptop is a goner lol. That's why I transferred all those files to my Win 10 on the first place. Lucky I already back those files up in an external hard disc before my Win 7 broke down.