I there a particular font to make traditional Chinese characters consistent with Windows Codepage 950?

Question

I'm trying to write a macro in Word VBA to search documents written in Traditional Chinese Characters. Documents are in Unicode UTF8, but VBA Editor cannot interpret them because it is based on Microsoft Code page 950 for Traditional Chinese. Documentation says something about font MingLiU, but no info about what msoEncodingConstant to use when opening the document in VBA editor

Answer 1

VBA in the Traditional Chinese environment uses Windows Codepage 950. For consistency with that code page when working with Traditional Chinese text in Word, the relevant pieces are:

1. Encoding / code page
   • Codepage 950 corresponds to Traditional Chinese Big5.
   • In the MsoEncoding enumeration, the matching constant is:

          msoEncodingTraditionalChineseBig5   ' value = 950
     

   • For auto-detection of Traditional Chinese encodings, there is also:

          msoEncodingTraditionalChineseAutoDetect   ' value = 50950
     

   When opening or saving text via Word/Office objects that accept an Encoding argument, use msoEncodingTraditionalChineseBig5 to align with Codepage 950.
2. Font for Traditional Chinese / Codepage 950
   • Word maps Traditional Chinese encodings (including BIG5) to the MingLiU font family by default.
   • MingLiU is a Traditional Chinese mincho (serif) font; its code pages include 1950 Chinese: Traditional chars–Taiwan and Hong Kong SAR, which corresponds to the Traditional Chinese set used with Codepage 950.
3. VBA identifiers and Codepage 950
   • VBA support for identifiers containing Traditional Chinese characters is based on Windows Codepage 950.
   • Traditional Chinese characters are encoded as 16‑bit double‑byte characters with code points beginning at %xA140 in Codepage 950; their Unicode equivalents are defined in bestfit950.txt.

Putting this together:

• Use msoEncodingTraditionalChineseBig5 when specifying encoding in Word/Office VBA to match the VBA editor’s Traditional Chinese Codepage 950 behavior.
• Use MingLiU (or its variants such as MingLiU_HKSCS) as the font to keep display consistent with Word’s default mapping for Traditional Chinese encodings.

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References:

• MsoEncoding enumeration (Office)
• Choose text encoding when you open and save files
• MingLiU font family
• Font information
• Traditional Chinese Identifiers