Traditional Chinese Characters - Big5
Big5 is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and older overseas chinese communities
and has about 13,000 traditional chinese characters.
The traditional characters are also in use in Japan and Korea.
(The traditional characters of Chinese, Japanese and Korean are not perfectly
interchangeable though. Each country has its own special characters.)
If the chinese characters are from web pages of
Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan or Korea
then set option to Traditional.
Simplified Chinese Characters - GB
GB (short for "Guojia Biaozhun" or "National Standard") is the standard
used in the People's Republic of China and Singapore and it has a set
of about 7,000 simplified chinese characters.
If the chinese characters are from web pages of
mainland China or Singapore, then set option to Simplified.
Chinese Fonts
If you are browsing any chinese web pages with Internet Explorer,
the relevant chinese font packs will be automatically installed via on-line
by Microsoft.
For Netscape, download chinese free font from
Microsoft.
From Netscape's main menu,
select "Preferences" - "Appearance" - "Fonts".
Select "Simplified Chinese" for the encoding, and choose
"MS Song" or "MS Hei" for the proportional and fixed length fonts.
For the "Traditional Chinese Encoding", select "MingLiU" as the font.
In the 1950's, the Chinese Communist government started a program
of massive character simplification with the goal of improving
literacy rates.
The simplified characters have a much
larger population using them, but the traditional characters
are still important for reading classical chinese literature
and east asian documents.