trouble viewing japanese characters

[Kithanye]

Hey, I suppose this would be where I would post this problem. I'm new to the site and cannot seem to view the characters on the page. Not in the lessons or anything, except when they're in a banner or something of the sort. All I get in the "Frank and Obaasan" series is a bunch of question marks. I've already tried checking my encoding, and everything is set properly there. I'm using Mozzila Firefox. Can anyone help with this problem? I'd appreciate any advice.

Thanks Much!!

Kithanye

[chikara]

Have you read the FAQ, in particular Questions about using Japanese on my computer?

Sounds very much as if you don't have Japanese support installed on your PC.

[dmizer]

Since the FAQ really doesn't give an answer to your problem here ...

You have to turn on the support for the Japanese character codings in Firefox. It's very easy to do this:

go to ...
view > character encoding > more encodings > east asian
and click on the following three encodings:
iso-2022-jp
shift-jis
euc-jp

double check your "character encoding" list to make sure all of these (as well as "Unicode") appear in the list.

It may also help to select "Japanese" under the Auto-detect option.

[Kithanye]

As for the encoding, I've already done that. All those options are there & I selected each of the during my guess work. I've no idea what the problem is. I decided to try viewing the page via Internet Explorer, and it works there. I guess that's how I'll have to view it from now on. Thanks for the help guys!!

Kithanye

[dmizer]

In firefox, when you're looking at the "Frank and Obaasan" page, if you go to:
view > character encoding

which character encoding has the black dot next to it? it should be next to "Japanese (Shift_JIS)" if not, try manually selecting shift-jis.

[Chris Hart]

If you don't have japanese fonts installed, the above tricks won't work. Try adding Japanese support see this article in the faq, or if you don't have enough access to the computer (work computer?) there's always this page that will convert the Japanese text into images.

[podomo32]

it's probably because:

1. it isn't unicoded
2. you used google translator and didn't download a language pack.
3. it just DOESN'T work.

note: if you write a japanese document on notepad, you have to save it unicoded. also, if you're using firefox, you may have certain scripts throwing you off. remember that you can enable and/or disable scripts in firefox.