[thelist] Japanese translations

[kasimir-k]

Neal Watkins scribeva in 24/01/2006 21:30:
> I actually have a word doc with the Japanese translations - but applying to a
> webpage is a total different thing.

Ok.

> I cannot get it to render correctly
> Do i need a specofic font?

Yes. You'll need a font which includes Japanese characters. See below.

> do all the japanese fonts need to be converted into character code?

Kind of unanswerable  :-)

> first time dealing with asian languages obviously

Okey :-)

So back to basics then. And sorry, I'll start with really elementary 
basics, please don't get bored. I'll also (over)simplify things, so 
excuse that too.

- computers don't deal with letters or other characters, only with numbers
- so any letter or character in any language must be converted to a 
number so that a computer can deal with it - this is called character coding
- obviously decoder must agree with encoder on what letter is what 
number (i.e. what is the letters 'codepoint') - this is what is referred 
to with 'character sets'

Characters used in English can easily be represented with just 7-bit 
sequences (127 available codepoints), many European languages require 
full 8-bit bytes, but for Hiragana/Katakana that would hardly suffice, 
let alone if your text has Kanji characters - about 50,000 codepoints 
required... This is where Unicode steps in - it is possible to use many 
bytes for one character.

Fonts map codepoints to their graphical representations - letters and 
characters. So "japanese fonts need to be converted into character 
code?" is an upside down question... character codes are converted to 
visible letters with fonts - if a font doesn't have a letter for a given 
codepoint, a question mark is often displayed instead.

So I'd say that it's time for you to take the plunge in murky waters of 
character coding - after a while it all starts making sense, and then 
it'll be easy for you to make sites using any writing system, be it 
Latin alphabet, kanji or cuneiforms...

Start with these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/index.html

.k