[throwaway290]

It's very simple:

1) software renders not Unicode characters but font glyphs

2) which font glyphs are chosen depends on many factors like installed fonts, OS, language/region settings, and so on

3) people author (and read) characters by how they look on their systems, what codepoints are used is not on anyone's mind

A differently configured system can uncover incorrect codepoint choices or rendering differences across machines, exactly what happened with the author of that tweet (supposedly living in Europe and not having the same old Windows machine as ones used in CCP apparat).

In fact, this happens all the time and is a routine headache for anyone building CJK sites viewed from different countries in the region (for example, I see some traditional Japanese characters, instead of their simplified Chinese versions, on http://cs.mfa.gov.cn/wgrlh/. Is there a hidden meaning? Is the site fake?). When it comes to MS Word and IME in old Windows versions, things are even wilder. I doubt the tweeter didn't know this, most likely it's a stall tactic.

CJK is a hot mess, but it is what it is.

[fps_doug]

That happens if you have no language hints, or the wrong one, e.g. posting in Simplified Chinese on a Taiwanese website. If this was written in something like MSWord by CCP officials, it should have the proper language hint, so render properly on any OS newer than XP.

[throwaway290]

I'm not sure what you mean by language hints.

Setting aside all other assumptions you make about the soundness of their setup overall, consistency of their input methods, newness of their inventory, etc., do you actually believe they would have the fonts with traditional glyphs in them installed and used at all? What for? Remember, this applies to the system as a whole. A character would be shown as simplified by the system even during input.

Again, I tried it and I got different results in different software (even on a Mac), with Pages in particular showing only simplified characters and straight layout (in contrast to Quick Look, which is what the tweeter must have used). Do you seriously think CCP officials have a fleet of Macs to check document appearance in case they are leaked and/or scan documents for "enemy" Unicode points? If not, how they would even know what code points are there, if all they ever see is simplified?

One needs to look at vocabulary, word choices and such. That is something that could actually point to fakery. Nothing like that was claimed yet, of course.

[fps_doug]

> I'm not sure what you mean by language hints.

Because of the han unification, you can tell the font renderer which language context you're in and want things to be rendered. MSWord shows you the language in the status bar at the bottom, which is not only used for spell checking. In html, you can add the lang attribute to a tag to tell the browser what language the contained glyphs belong to.

> do you actually believe they would have the fonts with traditional glyphs in them installed and used at all? What for?

Because ever since Vista, these come pre-installed regardless of your locale.

> Do you seriously think CCP officials have a fleet of Macs to check document appearance in case they are leaked and/or scan documents for "enemy" Unicode points?

I don't believe anything in particular, just adding technical context. The documents could also have been leaked through Taiwan or Hong Kong and then mangled there resulting in this.

[throwaway290]

> In html, you can add the lang attribute to a tag to tell the browser what language the contained glyphs belong to.

Well, you can visit probably any official Chinese government department website right now and see traditional Japanese characters instead of their simplified equivalents, if your machine happens to be configured that way. (Or at least the first one I stumbled across was like that, I pasted link somewhere in another comment. And I most certainly have Chinese fonts installed; in fact I see only simplified characters when I open the tweeted document in Pages.)

So they clearly do not make that effort even with documents actually crafted with foreign readers in mind. Presumably things can't be expected to be better if we are discussing secret documents intended for internal CCP consumption.

[glenstein]

Right, and a premise of the tweet cited here is that different character sets mean you should just freely assume it's fabricated by Taiwan. It doesn't make that argument (at least not anywhere in the cited thread), it just presents an examination of characters with that as an underlying assumption.