Chinese on Japanese OS

Chinese Japanese WinXP edition

[sleidia]

Hi guys,

Part of my work is to create/manage websites in Japanese.
The only OS I can use is a Japanese version of WinXP (computer bought in Japan).

Now, I'm planning to have a Chinese version for each site I manage.
Since I know nothing about the Chinese language, I will ask a professional translator to send me the Chinese texts on Word documents.

But what I need to know is whether or not it will be safe to manipulate the Chinese texts (mainly copy/paste/line breaks insertions) in order to integrate them into HTML pages.

I use PSPAD for the coding.

So, what is the right procedure to start working with Chinese text safely on a Japanese OS?

Thanks a lot for the help!

[bill]

WinXP is quite good at handling CJK text nowadays. I have no problems entering Japanese or Chinese text from either Japanese or Chinese versions of XP, although I can do it with English as well.

To setup text entry options in Windows XP in the Control Panel go to the Regional and Language Options. Then on the Languages tab click the Details... button. From there you can add all the different language input options.

[sleidia]

Thanks a lot Bill :)

I've added the Chinese and Korean languages and they are now available in IME but I'm stuck now.

For example, I did copy some text from <snip> ( encoding is gb2312 ), but pasting it in my text editor produces nothing but garbled text. I was using the font MingLiu which I suppose is for BIG5?

So, where do I find all the correct Chinese and Korean fixed-width fonts for free so that I can safely copy/paste text taken from all the existing charsets?

Thanks for the help again!

[edited by: sleidia at 10:03 am (utc) on July 10, 2006]

[edited by: bill at 11:19 am (utc) on July 10, 2006]
[edit reason] no URLs please [/edit]

[bill]

Can your text editor handle these other languages? Notepad in Windows isn't the best tool for this.

Windows has plenty of fonts available in it already, but your problem is having the right character sets installed properly. If you've got those then you just need an editor that can access these different charsets.

Although it is not a very good code editor, Microsoft Word is generally quite good at word processing with any installed language on your system.

[sleidia]

Hi again,

As I said, I use PSPAD ( [pspad.com...] ) which is supposed to handle Asian languages.

Anyway, I tested with MS Word as well, and the Korean text taken from some web page became mere dots. The Chinese text did work though.

Personally, I'd prefer to have a fixed-width font for each language.
This would make programming easier.

[LifeinAsia]

What I have found to work well is to same the Word file into an encoded .txt file (do Save As, change "Save as type" to "Encoded Text" then select the proper encoding for that language- e.g., "Chinese Simplified (GB2312)"). Then open that text file in your HTML editor and copy and paste.

This works well when I have used English Windows. Not as good luck when using a Korean Windows computer.

[sleidia]

Thanks LifeinAsia :)

I knew about this trick before, but I found it quite a hassle to use it in the end.

Anyway, I did finally manage to edit Chinese and Korean on the latest version of PSPAD but it works only when you stick with UTF-8 (I've always worked with Ansi).

The second problem is that the fonts that are used aren't very nice to code with because they aren't fixed-width fonts.

I hope someone can show me nice fixed-width fonts that can be downloaded for free for these languages.

Lastly, I'm also trying to make all those foreign fonts (Chinese and Korean) work with Adobe products (mainly Photoshop and Illustrator). Photoshop 7 can handle those fonts pretty well. But Illustrator 8 doesn't even show the fonts in the font menu :(

[sleidia]

I think I'll get rid of Illustrator and start using InkScape ( www.inkscape.org ) which is an open source application for vector graphics that handle all asian fonts very well. I know, I've just tested :)