Apologies if my question is ridiculously trivial - I'm not a developer, just a 
relatively new user of Python 3.0.1 on Mac OS 10.4.11. and I have only just now 
joined the list.

When I read in a Chinese text in the Python 3 IDLE GUI on Windows XP I see all 
the Chinese glyphs displayed properly. On my Mac, about one third of the 
Chinese characters are not displayed correctly (just empty or black boxes in 
place of glyphs). It doesn't matter whether I save/open texts as utf-8, utf-16, 
etc. [The glyphs display fine in TextEdit, JEdit, Word etc.]  And the same kind 
of problem occurs when I scroll through the list of font names in Preferences 
in IDLE: the names in Chinese glyphs have a number of white or black boxes 
instead of the glyphs.

I just assume that this has something to do with the locale settings in IDLE? 
On my machine:

>>> locale.getpreferredencoding()
'mac-roman'
>>> locale.getlocale()
(None, None)

In my Windows XP, the locale settings are (English, '1252') and I presume that 
this difference is relevant to understanding the different effects I get 
opening Chinese texts in my Windows XP and my Mac. 'mac-roman' would not be my 
natural choice of encoding if I am looking at Chinese text! I need an encoding 
which can handle the range of glyphs we find in GB 18030, say.

Am I being naive in thinking that all I have to do in Python is somehow change 
the locale settings in some way which will display Chnese glyphs?  I'm at a 
loss to know what I should do in order to display Chinese glyphs properly on 
the Mac. I tried experimenting with "setlocale" but couldn't make progress.

Any suggestions would be very welcome.

John


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