Use of Chinese Extension Fonts

Generally speaking, the default Chinese fonts that are already installed in your computer should be sufficient to use this website. Depending on which operating system and internet browser, however, you may see that some characters are not displayed correctly, displaying as little square blocks instead. This may occur most often when viewing our character etymology pages. The reason for this is that when we decompose a character into its component parts, the parts themselves may not be valid stand-alone characters or they may have been valid characters in the distant past but are currently obsolete. When this happens, you may simply ignore the undisplayed character since it is usually pretty easy to deduce which part of the original character the undisplayed character is supposed to be.

However, if you are a perfectionist and really want to try to display all characters, read on.

Windows Vista

Congratulations. Windows Vista already comes with all of the fonts and setting necessary to view all Chinese characters without any modification.

Windows XP, ME

1. Download the hannomH.zip file at this download site. The file is 28MB long so make sure that you have a fast internet connection.
2. Unzip (extract) the contents of the saved hannomH.zip file.
3. Open the Start » Control Panel » Font folder.
4. Open the unzipped font folder
   1. Drag the HAN NOM A.TTF file from the unzipped folder to the Font folder.
   2. Drag the HAN NOM B.TTF file from the unzipped folder to the Font folder.
5. If you generally access our site using Internet Explorer, click on this link and then click on Run to register the font with Internet Explorer.

Problems?

If you have problems with the font installation, please contact your resident expert. We cannot provide technical support on this issue.