To run, this applet does not require you to have a Chinese system or Chinese fonts installed on your system. However, in order to view the characters you will need a Chinese system such as TwinBridge for Windows or the Apple Chinese Lanugage Kit for the Macintosh. Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to view the characters in Unix (yet, Java 1.1 should solve this problem).
To use, paste or type the Big5 text into the the top window and click on the "Big5 to GB" button to have the GB text appear on the bottom window. Do the same in reverse for GB text. Unfortunately, you can't display both the GB and the Big5 text simultaneously, but it is there.
This applet is useful for quickly converting a limited amount of text, but is not convenient for entire files. If you want to convert an entire file at once, please use the File GB/HZ/Big5 Converter. I also have an on-line application for converting web pages. This Web Page GB/HZ/Big5 Converter only requires that you give the URL (address) and encoding of the page you wish to convert and the encoding you wish to convert to.
I'm interested in hearing your ideas and suggestions for this tool. Please e-mail me at eepeter@erols.com with your comments. If you came to this page directly, you might also want to take a look at some of my other on-line Chinese tools.