UTF8 encoding not working on some windows pc's

Hi I have written a Multilingal (eng and chinese) site for a client. On the pc's within their office they can't see the chinese characters. I have set a meta tag within the head section as utf8. Is there a windows setting that needs to be set ? They say开发者_如何学运维 they can read chinese on other sites so am assuming they already have the fonts installed.

They're using IE8 on windows (not sure if it's xp).

The strange thing is it works perfect on my old xp machinese and my windows7 gaming rig.

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Just because they can see Chinese characters on other sites does not mean that they have "the fonts" installed on their machines. There is no such thing as "the fonts." Those other sites may be specifying a specific font to use, perhaps one that is not even using utf-8. Your client's machines may have that font installed, but not the one you are using.

It looks like you are specifying Arial as your display font, and the Arial font (at least, in Windows XP) does not have Chinese characters. With the multilingual pack installed, the browser tries to choose an appropriate font based on the character range. You might add the "lang" attribute to sections with Chinese characters and then specify a font-family collection for those areas that include Chinese-friendly fonts. See "Styling using language attributes".

For the record, I can see the characters fine on Windows 7 in both Chrome and IE.

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By default, the English version of Windows XP does not have any Unicode fonts installed. The easiest way to install some (such as MS Mincho) is like this:

Note: You may need a Windows XP CD to change this setting!

Go to Start, Control Panel, Classic View (if it's not set to Classic), Regional and Language Options, Languages tab.

On this page, check the box next to "Install files for East Asian language" then click OK.

It's likely a good idea to check the other checkbox at the same time.