# Non-Roman Character Display on the Board **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [March 16, 2007, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158 "2007-03-16T04:57:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2007, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/1 "2007-03-16T04:57:33Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Autolycus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/22d042/32.png) [@Autolycus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Autolycus)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2007, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/2 "2007-03-16T07:37:20Z")
分かりません。 Wait, you’re talking about alt-codes right? I think? Or do you mean other languages? ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2007, 7:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/3 "2007-03-16T07:55:22Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2007, 8:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/4 "2007-03-16T08:24:31Z")
[QUOTE=Sleel] **Monty** has Hangul for his location statement [/QUOTE] 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. ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2007, 9:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/5 "2007-03-16T09:51:50Z")
‚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 ---
**Author:** ![DSYoungEsq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c6cbf5/32.png) [@DSYoungEsq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSYoungEsq)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2007, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/6 "2007-03-16T12:48:27Z")
[QUOTE=Sleel] ‚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 [/QUOTE] Those do not look like Japanese characters to me, if that was what you intended. They look like random ASCII characters. ---
**Author:** ![Eureka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/74df32/32.png) [@Eureka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eureka)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2007, 1:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/7 "2007-03-16T13:11:17Z")
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq] Those do not look like Japanese characters to me, if that was what you intended. They look like random ASCII characters. [/QUOTE] But on my computer, that means they show up. All the fancy characters other people are posting look like little boxes to me. ---
**Author:** ![Cervaise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cervaise/32/16693_2.png) [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2007, 2:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/8 "2007-03-16T14:12:34Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2007, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/9 "2007-03-17T00:42:14Z")
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq] Those do not look like Japanese characters to me, if that was what you intended. They look like random ASCII characters. [/QUOTE] 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. ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2007, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/10 "2007-03-17T02:25:03Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2007, 7:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/11 "2007-03-17T07:27:40Z")
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](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. ---
**Author:** ![Noone\_Special](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/noone_special/32/2863_2.png) [@Noone\_Special](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noone_Special)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2007, 9:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/12 "2007-03-17T09:45:30Z")
Note on Unicode usage: you can enter Unicode characters by typing “&#\;” where \ 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 ---
**Author:** ![DSYoungEsq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c6cbf5/32.png) [@DSYoungEsq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSYoungEsq)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2007, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/13 "2007-03-17T14:25:50Z")
[QUOTE=Monty] 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. [/QUOTE] 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? ---
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [March 17, 2007, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/14 "2007-03-17T15:22:03Z")
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](http://www.microsoft.com/typography/unicode/cs.htm) [Character sets and codepages](http://www.microsoft.com/typography/unicode/cscp.htm) Adding to what Noone Special said: here is a list of the Unicode code charts. [http://www.unicode.org/charts/](http://www.unicode.org/charts/) ---
**Author:** ![DSYoungEsq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c6cbf5/32.png) [@DSYoungEsq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSYoungEsq)\ **Post date:** [March 18, 2007, 2:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/15 "2007-03-18T02:44:51Z")
Thanks Arnold! I’ll have something to read in the morning, now. 🙂 After I sober up. Oh, wait, I didn’t get so think as I drunk I am this St. Paddy’s day. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2007, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/16 "2007-03-19T01:26:58Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2007, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/17 "2007-03-19T01:51:58Z")
Let’s give this a shot. ファイやフォックスはどうでしょうか。 ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2007, 1:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/18 "2007-03-19T01:53:36Z")
サファリもう一回ウニコードで。 ---
**Author:** ![Sleel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/73ab20/32.png) [@Sleel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sleel)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2007, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/19 "2007-03-19T01:57:59Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Arnold\_Winkelried](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2007, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/non-roman-character-display-on-the-board/396158/20 "2007-03-19T15:38:32Z")
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”.