re: How to access Chinese characters?

I need a seemingly very simple thing done. In designing my webpage, I need a Chinese-character version of my name. I've already located the right characters in the "Character Palette" in the upper-right "American Flag" menu of my Panther (10.3.9) OS. I've even added the characters to my favourites and checked to see which fonts have those three characters (Osaka Regular and Osaka Regular-Mono).

Problem is, I can't get the characters into an application so I can give it to my designer. I've tried double-clicking in the palette, copy-paste, etc. I've tried a multitude of fonts including the two Osaka fonts. I tried in both MS Word and Adobe Photoshop. When the word goes from the Character Palette into Word or Photoshop, they only go in as two accented English characters.

It seems like if I have the character in the palette and the font, I should be able to switch. But I'm missing a step. Please advise.

You may forget the most powerful text editor already come with every mac, "TextEdit". (in term of double byte character handling=)

You should select those chinese characters from the "Character Palette" then drag & drop them into the TextEdit's window directly. Finally save it as RTF format.(as default)

Have Fun,
Antonio Hui

Thanks, Antonio -- that worked. I'd like to know, though, why TextEdit in particular was able to get that character off. Don't all my applications -- Photoshop, MS Word and TextEdit -- run off the same set of fonts in my Macintosh HD - Library - Fonts folder? Also, how can I change the font to the characters -- is it even possible using the characters from the Character Palette? This one just responds differently; I've been working with Chinese text at work and there, when I receive a document from a client in Chinese and we don't have that font, we get endless underscore ("_" characters, but when I change them to a Chinese font we do have, they come through fine with very few exceptions. My applications don't behave in the same way. Is it because my computer isn't Traditional Chinese-enabled? Under the International options, in "Traditional Chinese", I get "Input Method" (?)instead of "Keyboard".

Huh! Make sure you are using Hanyin in the American Flag tab... it is a far better system. I use it all the time with photoshop/FCP and have had no problem. You may also want to see if there are any font packages you want to use. I bought one years ago in OS9 and it still works great.