Coding in Japanese

Which HTML editor to use?

[philicious]

I am doing a Japanese version of a website (finally bring my former and current careers together, in harmony!), but am having problems with HTML editors.
I am using WinXP with the Japanese language pack installed, which all works fine, but Dreamweaver MX gives me grief when I paste my Japanese characters in.
So, breathing deeply, I have tried using FrontPage. When I paste Japanese from Word, it puts all this extra code around the text selection, annoying when I am trying to paste into the title and meta tags etc.
Anyone know why this happening and how I can fix it?
I can write directly to the page with no problem, but I want to cut and paste the text from the translator...
Thanks, Philicious

[bill]

philicious the problem you describe between FrontPage and Word is well known. A work-around is to put your Japanese text into NotePad or some other text editor and then copy and paste from there. That will help you avoid all of the Word-generated HTML garbage.

Another way to get past the Word formatting is to use FP's Edit¦Paste Special...¦Normal Paragraphs. This will also get rid of any of the styling tags carried over from Word.

One of the few good things I've read about the upcoming Office 2003 is that FrontPage has been given a real overhaul. They noted this problem of copying and pasting from Office software into FrontPage, and reportedly have fixed things.

[Xuefer]

maybe u've mis-configure your keyboard
try Control Pannel->keyboard

[bill]

Xuefer that's a good tip for getting people started on setting up multi-language input on Windows. That's usually where you can activate the IME depending on the flavor of Windows OS you're using.

philicious is having a problem that is specific to FrontPage. I just remembered that I had been able to work with a Japanese Word document by copying and pasting into TopStyle's HTML/XHTML editor for a small site recently. The document structure was made in FP, but I did all of the manual stuff with other software. I guess you could do the same with NotePad or another text editor as well.

[whats up skip]

Make sure you force MS Frontpage to the correct language and encoding. It likes to change things from time to time.

As for Dreamweaver, the Japanese version is much cheaper than the English, so we just bought the Japanese version.

I have heard, but I could be wrong, that there is a download available for English Win XP PRO that can change all the menus etc into Japanese. This is not just the language module or the Office XP language module.

[bill]

I have heard, but I could be wrong, that there is a download available for English Win XP PRO that can change all the menus etc into Japanese. This is not just the language module or the Office XP language module.

Something like that has been available since Windows 2000. It will only work on selected operating system dialogs, IE and various Office products. All this does is change menus and dialog box messages essentially. The ability to input Japanese doesn't change whether you implement this or not.

[Muskie]

Though I've made little use of it so far, Mac OS X ships with numerous languages in one package. So you can swap the entire OS to say Japanese, or there is a second option to just change over the character input. This alows you to type 'ka' and get various options, in a little popup menu. Windows has a similar thing I just can't remember what it's called. It is usually a third party tool in Windows I think but is built into OS X. Used in conjunction with say BBEdit I'm lead to believe I could make Japanese webpages. I know other people who've done it, my sites are currently only in English.

Another product might be JEdit, it is a java based text editor that will run on either Windows XP or say Mac OS X. It was created in Japan so presumeably they built in the some ability to handle dual language, I'm guessing. They have a companion link checker and HTML validator called JChecker. I'm just checking this product out on my home box, never thought to try Japanese input yet.

Muskie

[bill]

Mac OS X ships with numerous languages in one package

Mac has always been good with multi-langage support. Starting with Windows 2000 and Office 2000, multilingual support has been vastly improved in Microsoft software. Windows XP and Office XP have even better support integrated. Although I haven't used the Mac OS in many years I've heard that Windows language support is now just as good.

[Eric_Jarvis]

if you can bear to stop using a WYSIWYG it may be a lot easier to put the Japanese text in with a text based editor...I've had no problem working in the CJK and Cyrilic languages using Arachnophilia or Note Tab Pro