I understand this may not have been a common issue, but it has come up in these posts at least.
I believe the Noto Sans font supports both Latin characters, and Chinese? The current font for post content is “Arial, sans-serif”.
Might you consider moving over to Noto Sans (or something similar) which also supports a wide range of non-Latin languages?
I see the Chinese characters rendered correctly in Firefox on macOS with the current “Arial, sans-serif” font family. I guess maybe it depends on the operating system you are using whether the default sans-serif font supports non-Latin characters.
Ah I see. It’s perhaps an issue that presents on Linux then. Under both a Firefox and Chromium derivatives, it appears as this for me:
I have Arial installed. Perhaps that’s part of the issue, as the default font under this version of Linux at least, would otherwise be Noto.
Do you have Arial installed on macOS, or is it falling back to a default sans-serif font (which may support Chinese characters)?
If I go into Firefox’s dev tools and modify the style to remove sans-serif and use Arial only, I still see the correct Chinese characters.
Thanks @joshtynjala, that’s a good way to test, I’ll have a play with that.
Under Chromium, the dev tools let you see the rendered fonts, including what it’s falling back to when a character isn’t supported. I couldn’t find this under Firefox’s dev tools.
In this case mine is actually falling back to “Unicode BMP Fallback SIL”. I’d be interested to see what it’s falling back to under macOS (if anything).
Perhaps that’s sufficient though for the purposes of the forum. The website itself isn’t supplying a web-font that supports the characters, but presumably, users on systems needing those characters have the fallback fonts necessary? For everyone else (such as us), it’s just chance.
In Chrome’s devtools, I see that it is using PingFang SC for the Chinese characters. It seems to be a font that is included by default with macOS.
What I have been following is my own post
I just found this post
Ah。 Can’t you display ‘Chinese characters’ properly?
…
Correct @785597448 .
It did present an interesting situation. I’m not sure how urgent it might be, as it seemingly hasn’t been raised as a possible issue on the forum till now.
My wife who can read Chinese, would not be able to read the contents of your Chinese posts when viewed on this site, as it seems our systems (all Linux) don’t handle that gracefully, even after taking the advised steps to install the font sets that supposedly provide that support in these situations.
I fired up my Windows 10 VM to see what it might do. It falls back to the “Microsoft YaHei” font and gracefully handles the Chinese characters.
Seems this version of Linux I’m using, isn’t set up by default to gracefully handle Chinese characters when a website calls on a fallback font.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that yesterday, I was testing some cross-platform Lime tweaks, and I decided to load up the forum on my Linux Mint machine to see how the Chinese characters looked there. They rendered in both Chromium and Firefox! I recall that Firefox used a Chinese variant of Noto Sans as its fallback, and Chromium used a Chinese variant of Droid Sans.
Credit to Linux Mint for providing a polished end-user experience 
I’m at the complete opposite end of the scale, using Arch based distributions, where the onus is on the user to fill in the gaps.
It’s been an interesting experiment, and I understand now my situation is unlikely to occur for the seemingly overwhelming majority of users. In one sense, by using Arch, I brought this on myself 
From a web-development perspective, I could suggest that web-fonts help ensure a consistent experience despite end-user OS/device. The default “Arial, sans-serif” font-family does at least appear to be consistent across the few Discourse forums I’m involved in.
I’m not pushing hard for any change @joshtynjala, particularly as we’ve at least been able to isolate the issue to more obscure corners of the Linux world I’m sure your time is better spent on bigger fish.
My thanks.
