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#1 2006-12-11 23:50:32

amokrun
Member
From: Finland
Registered: 2006-08-08
Posts: 413

How to read and write japanese on this forum - short guide.

This is a quick guide to reading and writing japanese with your browser. This guide explains the fastest way to get the basics working and gives links to further reading for those who are interested. Since this forum deals with a topic that is often closely tied to japanese language, at least being able to see japanese characters can be essential even if you don't know japanese.

First, here is a simple test to see if your browser is currently capable of displaying japanese characters correctly. If you see the two characters here 尺八 (meaning shakuhachi, for the curious), your browser is working correctly. If, on the other hand, you see two question marks, two empty boxes or nothing at all, you need to go to step one. The first character looks a bit like R and the second is a bit like upside down V where the two lines don't connect. If you see something entirely different, go to step one.

Step 1: Reading japanese

If your browser failed to display the two characters correctly earlier you need to complete this step. Otherwise you can move on to the next step.

First, choose the operating system you are on. If you don't know, chances are that you are using Windows XP.

Windows XP, 2003:

Open the Start menu, then select Control Panel. From there, pick "Regional and Language Options". Up on the top there are three tabs. Choose the middle one, "Languages". Finally, there are few check boxes. Check the "Install files for East Asian languages" option and click Apply. You get a confirmation and then you are asked for the Windows CD.

After you reboot your machine, everything should work correctly. Return to this guide and check if you can now see the two kanji in the introduction.

Windows 2000:

Open the Start menu, then select Control Panel. From there, pick "Regional Options". In the window that opens, there is a "Language Settings" right on the first page. Scroll down the list and enable the appropriate languages. They should be listed as japanese or East Asia. After clicking Apply, you should be prompted for the Windows 2000 CD.

After you reboot your machine, everything should work correctly. Return to this guide and check if you can now see the two kanji in the introduction.

Windows (95, 98, ME and older):

These operating systems don't have the same built-in support for Asian languages as the newer Windows versions do. It is highly recommended to upgrade to Windows XP. It is possible to get things working here as well. If you really need to do this, check this page and scroll down to the Windows 95/98/ME section:

Wikipedia - East Asian language page

Mac OS X:

Newer OS X versions come with the required support. For some older versions, it is necessary to install the required language kits. If you are on older OS X, check the following page and scroll down to Mac OS X section to find links to the appropriate language files.

Wikipedia - East Asian language page

Check this guide again to see if you can now see kanji properly.

Linux:

Most Linux users already have support for japanese in the system. Often all that is required is a font file. This page lists the appropriate pages in various Linux distributions. Scroll down to the Linux section.

Wikipedia - East Asian language page

If your distribution is not listed, search your package manager for packages that talk about fonts. Japanese font packages often contain the term CJK (for Chinese, Japanese, Korean). Searching for CJK fonts usually gives you the right package.

Once you have the proper font installed, check this guide again and see if the kanji display properly. It is usually required to close the browser after you have installed the fonts.

Step 2: Writing japanese

Once you can properly see kanji, you may want to also be able to add them into your posts. This is not essential, so feel free to skip this part if you don't intend to write any japanese characters of your own.

Windows XP, 2003:

I recommend reading the following page. Scroll down until you get to the "Add Keyboard/Input Method Editor" section, about in middle of the page. Follow the instructions given there.

Microsoft - East Asian input for Windows XP and 2003

Windows 2000:

I recommend reading the following page. Scroll down until you get to the "Add Keyboard/Input Method Editor" section, about in middle of the page. Follow the instructions given there.

Microsoft - East Asian input for Windows 2000

Mac OS X:

Support for japanese input is built into the system but needs to be activated for most people. Click the Apple Menu, select "System Preferences", then select "International" icon and finally go to the "Input Menu" tab. Find the languages you want to use and select them. Different types of japanese writing are there as separate choices (Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana etc.). Choose those that you need.

Linux:

You should install and configure a program called Scim. There is a version for KDE (skim) and Gnome. It is possible that your distribution includes this or you may have to install it yourself. Given the wide range of distributions, I can't give detailed instructions on how to do this. For most people, it should be enough to just install the correct package.

If someone really wants to get this done but can't figure it out, drop me a note and I'll try to help you.

Step 3: Common problems

When I post or reply to a post with japanese characters, they disappear once the post is sent!

This is an old problem that has to do with how computers deal with different types of characters. The explanation for what happens is fairly technical, so you can safely skip the next paragraph.

What happens is that that shakuhachiforum.com uses character set called iso-latin1. This character set doesn't include japanese characters. When your browser notices this, it has to make a choice. It can either drop the japanese characters completely (which just happened to you) or it can attempt to be clever and replace those characters with HTML entities, which are another way of representing characters. The second way occasionally works fine and fails miserably at other times. On this particular forum, however, it works perfectly fine. Technically the problem lies with the forum and not you, but since you can't change the forum...

What the browser does depends entirely on which browser you are using. Personally I would recommend using Firefox if you are on Windows, Safari (or Firefox) if you are on Mac OS X and Firefox or Konqueror if you are on Linux. All those browsers work perfectly fine with this forum. You can also try to update your current browser.

All the japanese characters I post turn into random characters for some people!

If you are using some other character encoding than what the forum specifies (iso-latin1), any characters posted by you will turn into garbage for many people. This is somewhat connected to the last question. Just make sure that your browser automatically chooses the character encoding and do not choose it yourself. If you are using a browser that tries to use a wrong encoding, choose iso-latin1 (usually listed as iso-8859-1) by yourself and try again.

Last update: 12.12.2006

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#2 2006-12-12 00:14:40

edosan
Edomologist
From: Salt Lake City
Registered: 2005-10-09
Posts: 2185

Re: How to read and write japanese on this forum - short guide.



Very nice tutorial!


Zen is not easy.
It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have?
Bupkes.

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#3 2006-12-12 04:13:33

JF Lagrost
Shihan/Tozan Ryu
From: Paris (France)
Registered: 2006-10-19
Posts: 73
Website

Re: How to read and write japanese on this forum - short guide.

amokrun wrote:

Personally I would recommend using (...) Safari (or Firefox) if you are on Mac OS X

You know that I had little problems with Safari 1.0.3 (Mac OS X.2.8), but now I can write and post in japanese with Firefox. Thanks for this very nice guide.

Last edited by JF Lagrost (2006-12-12 04:15:01)

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#4 2006-12-12 04:59:06

amokrun
Member
From: Finland
Registered: 2006-08-08
Posts: 413

Re: How to read and write japanese on this forum - short guide.

JF Lagrost wrote:

You know that I had little problems with Safari 1.0.3 (Mac OS X.2.8), but now I can write and post in japanese with Firefox.

Yeah, I remember that one. I was thinking of waiting until I hear from couple of Mac users as to what their experiences are. Technically Safari is more or less the same thing as Konqueror on Linux which is what I use for posting. It works perfectly well, so I'm tempted to believe that the problem isn't in the browser itself. The whole thing is a bit tricky because the "broken" browsers are actually the ones that work correctly whereas the browsers that "work correctly" are in fact doing it wrong. That's what happens when you throw one thing that kind of gets it right at another thing that kind of does the same. Technically the forum says that the encoding is latin-1 and therefore you should submit latin-1 and just leave out any funny characters. It's just one of those cases where legacy standards bite you. After all, there would be no problem whatsoever if the entire forum worked as UTF-8 exclusively.

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#5 2006-12-12 11:32:12

mrosenlof
Member
From: Louisville Colorado USA
Registered: 2006-03-01
Posts: 82

Re: How to read and write japanese on this forum - short guide.

Nice job Amorkun!

I can comment on a couple of Linux distributions...

Ubuntu and Fedora both have good Japanese support available.  It's easiest if you enable the japanese support when you install the OS, but the package managers for both can install the appropriate packages relatively easily.

In Fedore, I've only enabled Japanese at install time (Red Hat 9.0 actually, but you get the idea), but with Ubuntu, start up Synaptic package manager and search for 'Japanese' in the package name.  It will be fairly obvious what packages to install.

My primary linux is a distribution from Japan that is pretty nice.  Vine Linux just hit their release 4.0.  It works well, Japanese support is excellent (as expected, given the country of origin), the package collection is pretty good, and with 4.0, is pretty current.  This appears to be a Red Hat branch, but has been independent for quite a while (best I can tell).  www.vinelinux.org

Finding English documentation for scim and anthy (they work together to handle Japanese input) is non-trivial.   I'll see if I can find a link to post here.


Mike Rosenlof

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#6 2006-12-12 11:46:36

amokrun
Member
From: Finland
Registered: 2006-08-08
Posts: 413

Re: How to read and write japanese on this forum - short guide.

mrosenlof wrote:

Finding English documentation for scim and anthy (they work together to handle Japanese input) is non-trivial.   I'll see if I can find a link to post here.

I didn't really have much trouble finding documentation back when I installed Skim last time around. I mostly use Gentoo at home, so the installation process for it is a bit more involved than it is with most distributions. Still, it basically boils down to getting the appropriate packages installed and selecting the correct input methods. I could give a detailed guide on how to do it for generic environment but unfortunately every distribution works differently here and my instructions would be bareful of any use. That's why I didn't try to write any detailed guide and instead figured that it's better if Linux users (doubt there are many on the forum) just ask about it.

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#7 2006-12-15 07:53:24

mrosenlof
Member
From: Louisville Colorado USA
Registered: 2006-03-01
Posts: 82

Re: How to read and write japanese on this forum - short guide.

Yeah, I agree that installation varies, the documentation I was refering to is how to use it.  Input techniques, and the like.  I know the basics, but haven't figured out, for example, how to highlight a string of hiragana in the middle of a page and run the kanji conversion/parsing on that without deleting and typing it over.  If that's possible! 

My Japanese is good (or bad) enough that I could probably make my way through Japanese documentation, but it would not be a trivial exercise.  Shakuhachi playing would be a more fun use of that time.

This page has the basics

http://www.h4.dion.ne.jp/~apricots/scim … howto.html

and maybe a few bits that I haven't committed to memory.  It also shows configuration options for anthy that I don't have in my Vine Linux desktop.


Mike Rosenlof

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