[thelist] What a "Rush!"

[Michele Foster]

hmm.. I can't find the message which refers to Jeff's ..

Anyway .. clarke.com is one of my sites.  Jeff was kind enough to do the
DHTML for the client, however.

I'm not sure I can be of much assistance .. as the character encoding for
CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and perhaps another ?) seems to be rather
unique and you'll need to investigate the options for your scenario.  I
spent a lot of time researching and testing various options.  With Netscape
4.x browsers, it *should* work, but I did run into one situation with an
older than 4.7 version where no matter what I changed the encoding too, I
could not get the page to display properly; however, I also discovered that
none of the other "big" sites (ibm, local Japanese news sites,  etc.) were
working in that particular version of NS4.x either.

The most important line is this one:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS">

Setting the character set.  This prompts IE to download, if it's not already
installed.  In NS6.x+ versions, if the page doesn't display properly one can
change the character set.  I tried several different ones, and this was the
best option.  I have no idea if there are various Russian versions too, but
you may need to do some thorough testing.  It was also tested on Mac
versions as best as I could.

The next important thing was, I needed an Editor that would read the
characters.  Again, I had to do several tests with content.  I was never
able to get HTML-ized email (from Outlook) into the Editor correctly.
Certain characters/symbols just didn't translate properly.  The same thing
happened when trying to Save As the text in MS Word.  I was getting
inconsistent results.  What *did* work 100% thoroughly was to just simply
copy and paste from Word into the Editor.  I'm not sure why other options
didn't work, but that's what we did.  Your mileage may vary.

In researched various editors too, and this is the one I chose to use:
http://www.emurasoft.com/emeditor3/index.htm.  The developer was awesome
with helping out.  I have no idea if it will work for you but you can
download the trial and give it a whirl.  Word of warning, work on a COPY of
the file.  I had some really odd things happen on more than one occasion.
For instance, the editor defaults to a set UNICODE, I had to make sure to
change the unicode/characterset preference before copying my text, or it got
corrupted.  Trial and error. ;)

A couple additional points .. you'll notice on the menu of my clarke site,
the four characters are in their numerical equivalent.  This wasn't done on
purpose/intentionally.  I accidentally opened the file in my editor of
choice (Edit Plus) and it converted those four characters automatically.
It's an "include" file, so I wasn't too worried about it.  If I hear of
people having problems with those four characters, I'll pull the file back
into EmEditor and recopy from Word.  So far, no-one has complained .. not
about that anyway ;).

One very interesting bonus that we discovered, if one is using a Japanese
enabled keyboard they can type Japanese into the form and submit it.  I
really didn't think it would work, but it did.  It comes into Outlook (the
client uses that too), and if it's the English-based machine, they need to
change the encoding (under View) to Shift-JIS and all is perfectly fine.
The Japanese-based machine receives it exactly as it would any other email.

Hope this helps .. a bit long .. sorry.

Michele


----- Original Message -----
From: "Rob Smith" <rob.smith at THERMON.com>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Monday, January 20, 2003 4:14 PM
Subject: RE: [thelist] What a "Rush!"


> hmm I think i learned more than I wanted to about this... :-) Ok. ASP
pages
> and Unicode do not go together. The pages must be saved in UNICODE in
> NOTEPAD, or some other document editor with UNICODE saving abilities.
>
> :-\ However, by looking at Jeff's http://clarke.com/japanese.asp that
> nullifies my second sentence. Or doesn't it?
>