Japanese Help

[Dave Cragg]

At 10:27 pm -0700 16/5/02, Scott Rossi wrote:
>Any folks on the list have experience displaying Japanese text in MetaCard
>on Windows?
>
>I'm displaying several lines of Japanese text in fields and buttons and I've
>run up against an issue I can't solve: the source Japanese text contains
>various strings of Roman character words.  If I set the textFont of the text
>to a Japanese font, the Roman characters become gibberish.  If I set the
>textFont of the containing field or button to a Japanese font, the entire
>text seems to get garbled as well.  This problem also seems to occur with
>Traditional Chinese and Korean, but strangely, Simplified Chinese appears to
>work as expected.
>
>Has anyone found a reliable way to display a text in MC that contains a mix
>of single and double byte characters?  I'm running up against a major
>deadline (Friday) so thanks in advance for any suggestions.

I've not played with this recently, so from memory of experience on NT 4.0 ...

I've only been able to display Japanese text in Windows in Metacard 
that was shift-JIS encoded. (Fairly standard for Japanese on Windows 
and Macs.) This allows single-byte Roman in the normal low ASCII 
range, and both will display in Metacard by just setting the font of 
the field to a Japanese font.

Assuming your source text is shift-JIS, one thing that might mess up 
single-byte Roman are any high ASCII characters within the Roman text 
(accents, etc.)

By the sound of it though, your text isn't shift-JIS or you have some 
extra characters in there which might account for the gibberish when 
setting the field font to Japanese.

I've had trouble with Japanese saved as text from MS Word (97). I 
found Wordpad to be more reliable. But overall, I found Japanese 
saved as text from Nisus Writer on a Mac to give the most consistent 
results in Metacard on both Windows and Macs.

Not much help I fear...

Cheers
Dave