Help displaying Japanese characters

[Atsuko]

Does anyone know where I can get a program that will allow me to display japanese characters on my PC because I'm trying to learn and I think that would aide me...when I installed the programs the encoding wasn't part of the pack and I can't find it anywhere.

 

[tasuki]

Depends on your OS. What are you running?

 

[Atsuko]

It's windows 200 professional. Thanks for replying though

 

[tasuki]

Well, just download the Global IME for Japanese from the Microsoft Web site, install it, and you're in business... Go here, select Microsoft Global IME 5.02 for Japanese-with Language Pack from the list and follow the instructions on the screen to proceed.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/recommended/ime/install.asp

 

[Atsuko]

Thank you so much tasuki! You are a life saver!

 

[tasuki]

That should work fine. You'll normally even be able to type Japanese, too. You're welcome.

 

[Atsuko]

Help

Thankyou for your help Tasuki, but I tried installing it and it wouldn't work because I have internet explorer 6.0 and the installation would only work for 5.0. Do you know any others?

 

[tasuki]

Good old Microsoft. Displaying Japanese characters is, in itself, not supposed to be complicated. All you need are the MS Micho and MS Gothic fonts and assign them to the language Japanese in your browser. They're readily available off the Web. You can also try

NJStar CJK Viewer (NJWIN) Version 1.96 | NJStar Software

which is a pretty good substitute.

 

[Atsuko]

Thank you

 

[tasuki]

Tell me if it works or not.

 

[Atsuko]

I tried it (NJStar) out and It seemed to work on the help page, but it wouldn't in the web browser.

 

[Spirit Atlantis]

For Japanese character to work in html on the web, copy your Japanese characters from NJstar and paste them into an entity encoder.
An entity is something from the ASCII table which is an international standard for characters/symbols/numbers etc.
An entity looks something like this &*#*12527, but without the asterices(*), if i would leave that asterice away you wouldn't see the entity code, but you would see a Japanese Katakana character.(-wa)
Try it, just type that entity into this forum without the asterices(*) and you will see that it appears as a Japanese character when you post your message.

Now if you want to convert entire strings of Japanese characters that you typed in NJstar, then you would need an entity convertor.
You can find one here: Wide character to entity encoder
Though i suggest you save the html file of this convertor onto your hard disk, because i don't know how long this convertor will stay online.
Entity convertors are a rare thing, weird but true, you won't find many around on the web.
So good luck with it and have fun, because the Japanese language is and looks just way cool.

ワタシ
彼の握りこぶしから壊れる場合太陽は燃える

 

[tasuki]

Even simpler, download and install the MS Mincho and MS Gothic fonts. Your browser version should not come into play in this case.

http://www.themeworld.com/fonts/indexM11.shtml

Then, all you need to do is go into the language options of your browser (with IE, in the Internt Options dialog box, click Languages), select Japanese and assign MS Gothic or MS Mincho as the Japanese fonts to be used by your browser. Problem solved.

 

[Atsuko]

HELLO!!

Well, well, well....
Good news (for me)!
My computer crashed (not the good news).
The pc company that fixed it found a lot of trojan viruses on the computer...so that took a lot of cleaning up; anyway, they installed Windows XP to combat windows 2000's incompatability with Norton antivirus (which I suppose was part of the problem - I don't really know, I'm not a computer buff). Long story short, I can finally view japanese characters on the web and in documents,(without having to tamper with, and eventually crash my pc - again) which shall make my quest to futher my knowledge in other languages much easier !
So, thanks to all the people that helped and gave advice! (especially Tasuki and Spirit Of Atlantis).