Foreign Charactors (Japanese)

[azshark1]

Does anyone know how to use Japanese charactors? Is there some way to make those weird symbols it makes when it gets converted to ascii will it work?
Thanks
-Scott

[hobbes]

You will not be able to work with Kanji characters using ASCII, or more properly ISO-8859-1. You will need to use the Unicode, Shift-JIS, or EUC encoding.

The Web client will need to be set-up to either auto-detect the Japanese encoding of the page or have it specified through HTML language tags. Japanese fonts will also need to be installed on the client system.

Unless, of course, you use images for the Kanji characters, which may be a good option if you just have a few on a page.

[azshark1]

Is there any free software that can do that? All I have is the Global IME that I got from microsoft's website. I can type Email with it, but that's about it.
Is it used just like english text in the html or is there some trick I need to know?
Thanks!
-Scott

[hobbes]

If you can already do input, there are no tricks. You just need to make sure the encoding you use to type the characters in, is the same as that used by the software to view the page (thus embedding the lang/encoding tag in HTML is useful).

[tmax]

I'll just throw stuffs at you, hope you'll find one information you can use.

If you have MS FrontPage you can input Japanese, easy... (I think)
But you cannot do that with DreamWeaver UD 4.
Perhaps the newest, DreamWeaver MX, will support Japanese.
I'm getting one pretty soon, I will find out.

Also, it helps a lot, if you have Windows 2000. Because you can set Japanese as your computer's second language.
You can also get a better edge if you have MS Office XP with the handwriting or speech feature installed. (then you can install XP version of IME)

MM... You can install Japanese version of windows, but that's not what you want, I guess.

whaterver it may be... seems like there is a way to get things going.
FutureQuest Forum is good, but we don't have much foreign language people here. There are many good forums out there, Keep looking.
Perhaps I can help. :)

FYI : I don't know Japanese.

[squillo]

The first step, assuming you're running Windows, is to install East Asian language support from Microsoft (free) or off the CD. When you are able to see Japanese on Japanese websites in Internet Explorer (not sure about current versions of Netscape), you are halfway there. There are a lot of sites that explain how to do this. You probably want to install the Japanese IME (Input Method Editor) as well.

On Windows95 running Dreamweaver2 several years ago, I was able to create some Japanese pages but it was tricky since it just appeared as gobbledy-gook in Dreamweaver, and only was visible within the browser. Now running XP with DreamweaverMX, I can see the Japanese within the code view.

If you just want to create a few cool Japanese characters, I still think you'll need the Japanese IME, but it should be pretty easy. Just convert the letters to vector outlines before trying to work with it somewhere else.

best!
Squillo