In the last few days I’ve been reading quite a bit about linguistics (and the nature of Asian languages, specifically). My interest is to the point that I think I might like to pursue it academically, though I’m not sure if I’ll ever actually do something like that simply because I have no idea how I would be able to support myself with a Master’s degree in linguistics (though, obviously people do, so it deserves more research).
One topic that comes up often is how to encode Asian languages (or any other language that deviates significantly from the English alphabet) in HTML and include that content in your posts. While I don’t have anything else to add to the conversation, as the technical aspects are rather clear and have been talked about quite a bit (here and here, to name a few), I do want to test it here to see how it works.
If anyone has trouble seeing the characters in the title (which is a Chinese proverb roughly analogous to “great minds think alike”), please respond in the comments. I think I’m doing everything right, but I’d like to know if there’s something else I can do to include Chinese (and Japanese or Korean or whatever) with the minimum of hassle on the reader’s end.
Using my factory shipped Windows XP on my new dell, I had to go to Control Panel / Regional and Language Options, select the second tab (Languages) and enable the “Install files for East Asian languages” checkbox. I’m now waiting for that to finish installing and will reload IE and see how it works.
Update: Yup, that did it for me. Post fixes for other versions of Windows, or operating systems as you like.
Left by Jordan on May 10th, 2003
On my Win2K machine with Japanese support enabled I see six Chinese characters. Whether they are the “correct” Chinese characters is another matter.
In order they are “English” (Unicode 82F1), “masculine/male/hero/leader” (96C4), “place” (6240), “see/idea/opinion” (898B), “abbreviation/omission/outline” (7565), and “same/agree/equal” (540C).
I’ll have another look, once I’ve enabled Simplified and Traditional Chinese on my other PC.
Left by Jonathon Delacour on May 10th, 2003
And yes; my reading comprehension is incredibly rusty, but those are at least the same meanings I read in the ones I recognize. So we’re likely getting the correct meaning as well.
Left by Jordan on May 10th, 2003
Yup, those are the correct characters (or the correct meanings). I’m reasonably sure that if they are the same characters in Japanese that they’ll show up correctly with only Japanese language support enabled.
Left by John on May 10th, 2003
Looks good here, and interestingly also looks fine in the Trackback title at my site….
Left by stavrosthewonderchicken on May 10th, 2003
This is a test of Japanese
I’ve implemented Trevor Hill’s Movable Type modifications (explained by Stavros in his comment on my previous post) by: Turning on the PublishCharset UTF-8 and NoHTMLEntities 1 configuration settings in mt.cfg. Ensuring that the character encoding in e…
Left by Jonathon Delacour on May 11th, 2003
Well, that sucks. For whatever reason my RH9 with the most recent Mozilla 1.4b isn’t renering the characters correctly. Wasn’t doing it with Moz 1.2, either, though Lin’s desktop shows the characters just fine with the same mozilla, same font settings, and same settings as far as we can tell.
Left by Jordan on May 12th, 2003
Absolutely fab
Left by Lara on February 21st, 2005