Fix Windows XP cannot display East Asian characters properly

How to fix Windows XP cannot display East Asian characters properly

19 Apr 2010 @ 5:09 PM

Lately I became addicted to papercraft. And a few weeks ago, I tried to join a Korean online papercraft community. I was surprised that my browser cannot display the Korean characters (Hangul CMIIW) properly. It only showed up as squares with small numbers. zz 19 How to fix Windows XP cannot display East Asian characters properly zz 11 How to fix Windows XP cannot display East Asian characters properly As far as I know, I already installed the files for East Asian languages. I tried to open some random Chinese and Japanese websites. They all showed up fine. My system only can’t display Korean characters properly! zz 4 How to fix Windows XP cannot display East Asian characters properly Although I can’t read any Korean character, at least I can tell the difference between words in that Korean web, if my browser can display them properly. zz 15 How to fix Windows XP cannot display East Asian characters properly

This of course troubled me a lot.

So I googled and read something about installing east asian language problem (sorry, I forget to note the site).

It says something about intl.inf file that contains the settings for windows to display foreign languages. It is located in C:/WINDOWS/inf/intl.inf. So I compared the intl.inf file in my notebook, to the one in my desktop computer. Surprisingly they have different file sizes. 443 KB in my notebook, and 830 KB in my desktop computer. So I uninstalled the East Asian Language pack in my notebook, renamed my original intl.inf file to intl.inf.bak (just in case I need it later), copy the intl.inf file from my desktop computer and paste it into my notebook. After that I restart my notebook, reinstall the files for East Asian Languages. Last, I restart my notebook once again. Voila! This time it displays Korean characters properly. Then I browse to Chinese and Japanese websites too. Just to check if they would showed up without any problem. Well, everything seems to be perfect. Happy me… zz 16 How to fix Windows XP cannot display East Asian characters properly

The source of the problem is the corrupted intl.inf file in my notebook. For some reason, the file size is smaller than the one in my desktop computer. For your information, they’re both running on Windows XP SP3. So, If you have this problem too, you can try this trick too. Check the screenshot below…