Frequently Asked Questions
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Diacritics and special graphs for the International Phonetic Alphabet are not represented in standard fonts and therefore not displaying properly (e.g. pp. 9-11). We are currently developing a solution.
[see also proofreading progress
We are currently updating our data under "Meanings", under "Examples", and for modern Chinese pronunciations and definitions.
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Classical Chinese texts contain some characters that are not represented in standard modern fonts. We are currently developing a method to present these characters outside of the standard fonts. Until then, they are substituted with "X" in texts (as in Laozi Daodejing, Chapter 27) and with Unicode values ("U-####") in search engine pop-up menus.
The symbol "ü" does not display tone marks on some systems and in some places displays as "v".
On some versions of the Macintosh operating system, the displaying of tone marks in pinyin transcription can result in deviation in size and spacing of certain letters.
The above mentioned problems with the display of pinyin and Chinese characters are, in general, either font or encoding issues. The font issues for pinyin result from the use of tone marks which are not generally used in English text. The problems for Chinese result from our use of less common characters, and our need for UTF-8 (Unicode) encoding instead of the older standard of Big5. It wasn't until Apple released OS X and Microsoft released Windows XP that both platforms were able to fully and correctly use Unicode (although no version of Internet Explorer is completely able to handle Unicode yet).
In older Macintosh systems there was no font with a comprehensive character set which could display all the vowel/tone combinations needed for pinyin. Microsoft supplied fonts with Internet Explorer which had the needed characters, but with spacing problems.
Big5 has only a limited capacity for encoding Chinese characters, which limits Big5 based web browsers in their ability to display Chinese: uncommon characters just aren't there. (We get around that by using little pictures, but that does limit funtionality.) Unicode removes the limits as to which characters are encoded, but the characters still need to be put in the fonts. Apple has been steadily adding additional Chinese characters to it's fonts; Microsoft is apparently doing so as well.
Updated 2/09/05