Non-Roman Character Display on the Board

I did a search for this but I can’t seem to find something on how to make special characters like double-byte glyphs show up on the board. I know it can be done because I’ve seen a few people do it (Monty has Hangul for his location statement) but when I try to post something I get ? in place of the glyph. It shows up in the message box, but doesn’t come through in the post.

Is this an encoding problem? I use Unicode as my default encoding.

分かりません。

Wait, you’re talking about alt-codes right? I think? Or do you mean other languages?

I do it by copying and pasting. Here’s a bit of Japanese, using 4 scripts, that I copied from Wikipedia:
ラドクリフ、マラソン五輪代表に1万m出場にも含み

To be accurate, I have my location displayed in 한글 (Han-Geul, using the ROK gov’t approved romanization). It’s 부산, which is the Han-Geul for Busan. Yes, that is the same city as Pusan.

Sometimes I post from work using my own laptop computer and other times I post from a PC 방 (PC Room). In the former case, I use the language bar on my computer to enable Korean and then cycle through English or Korean using the right-hand ALT key. In the latter case, I just hit the 한/영 key on the keyboard.

‚à‚¤ˆê‰ñ‚â‚Á‚ÄŒ©‚邯‚ǁB

Ah-ha. I played around with the encodings until I got one to work (Shift-JIS). Should have tried that before, but I didn’t want to lose what I’d already entered in a text box or look like an idiot if I accidentally posted it. I found out that the board is not compatible with Unicode. Grrr.

So, it looks like I have two choices, either make Shift-JIS my default encoding and deal with occasional •¶Žš‰»‚¯ on other pages, or force a Shift-JIS page load before I start entering text.@–Ê“|L‚¢‚ȁ`B

Those do not look like Japanese characters to me, if that was what you intended. They look like random ASCII characters.

But on my computer, that means they show up. All the fancy characters other people are posting look like little boxes to me.

You think you have it bad, every post by everybody else on this board looks like little boxes. My posts are the only ones I can read. Good thing I find myself so entertaining.

You need to go to View then Encoding and then select Shift-JIS. That will cause the window to redisplay and with the correct character set.

Know what, there’s still something screwy here. Before I switched my encoding to Shift-JIS, my post looked like nonsense too, but everyone else’s stuff showed up just fine. I have no idea why your posts show up properly but mine are all messed up.

In fact, I just cycled through all of the alternate encodings and the only post that has a problem is mine. It shows the right characters in Shift-JIS but doesn’t display properly otherwise, while everyone else’s characters show up regardless of the display encoding. Argh. I still don’t know what the deal is.

Sleel: I think that the problem is because everyone else had Unicode characters in their posts. Unicode characters will be displayed correctly by any application capable of displaying unicode characters (such as a recent web browser). On the other hand, it is possible to type in (non-unicode multi-byte) characters that depend on a specific operating system regional setting (in your case, the operating system is Windows). These non-unicode multi-byte characters will only be displayed correctly if your regional setting corresponds to the character set used when entering the characters originally. This is how any non-unicode application can display japanese characters.

This page has a short explanation on the difference (as relating to Visual Basic control):
http://www.jollans.com/faq/nonunicode.htm

For example: in my non-unicode application I type in shift-jis characters. These will look “correct” if I have my Windows regional setting on “shift-jis”. However, if I change my Windows regional setting to a korean character set, I might see korean characters because the multi-byte values for the characters correspond to something different for the korean character set. e.g. number 5002 would be used for a certain japanese character in shift-jis, and the same number 5002 would correspond to a korean character in the korean character set.
On the other hand, in Unicode, each character is unique for all languages, so for example, to simplify, numbers 10,001 to 20,000 could be reserved for japanese and 20,001 to 22,000 for korean.
Unicode is obviously better because I can display characters in korean and in japanese in the same document. With non-unicode I am limited to one character set at a time.

Note on Unicode usage: you can enter Unicode characters by typing “&#<charcode>;” where <charcode> is the numeric value.

For instance, if the code for Hebrew “aleph” is 1488 (which coincidentally it is :),) then typing “& # 1488 ;” without the spaces yields an א. Thus:

אבג - the beginning of the Hebrew alphabet

So, that’s only necessary if the characters are encoded using the view-specific character encoding, right? Like in Sleel’s post. But anything in Unicode will show correctly regardless of what setting for View>Encoding I have? Mine is set to Auto-Select; why would I ever bother with selecting Unicode, if Unicode displays correctly anyway?

DSYoungEsq: I don’t know why you would want to select Unicode in the View->Encoding menu in Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows.

Here are a couple of articles from Microsoft that explain it better than I did:
Character sets

Character sets and codepages

Adding to what Noone Special said: here is a list of the Unicode code charts.
http://www.unicode.org/charts/

Thanks Arnold! I’ll have something to read in the morning, now. :slight_smile:

After I sober up. Oh, wait, I didn’t get so think as I drunk I am this St. Paddy’s day. :frowning:

See, that’s the thing. I use a Mac and have Unicode as the default encoding for producing and reading anything. I thought that would be the most universal way of doing things, but every time I try to post Japanese here, the characters don’t display. All I get is a question mark ? in place of the character. Really starting to bug me. Maybe it’s browser-specific. Will try posting with Firefox next.

Let’s give this a shot.

ファイやフォックスはどうでしょうか。

サファリもう一回ウニコードで。

Well, looks like it’s browser-specific. For some reason Safari doesn’t want to play nice with this board, though I’ve had no problems with compatibility elsewhere. I tried forcing Unicode by specifically loading the page with Unicode display and then inputting Japanese, but that didn’t work any better than the Shift-JIS trick. Firefox did it all right though.

I’ll be sending a little blurb to Apple about this issue. I prefer the way Safari handles other text and rendering. It’s also faster than FF most of the time. Looks like I’d better switch if I want to post in Japanese though.

Sleel, I came up with the same thing you did. Couldn’t enter the japanese characters using Safari on Macintosh OS X, but I was able to with Firefox. I was using the “japanese input palette”.