漢字 and black diamonds

I think that I finally located the issue with the non-working kanji and kana. As far as I can see, both kanji (漢字) and kana (カナ) should now be available for use.

Actually, any other character set should work as well. As a test, here is the name one of my favourite authors: نجيب محفوظ

Making this happen involved a certain level of black magic, and I am not a hundred percent sure if everything works correctly on all browsers, all platforms and all eyes. Please report any strange phenomena. The following are an especially good indication that something is not working as it should: mangled text, black diamonds with questions marks inside of them, boxes instead of text, or simple question marks where there should be text. Let me know if you encounter any of them.

(And here’s a few test symbols: ❗ ❓ )

Nicely done, Vili, and thanks for this extra comfort.

At least, on reading, it works perfectly here (the newly UTF-8 encoding is well accepted by my 3 browsers – except for the title bar of the browser window, but I think that we can’t help this), and I will write some pretty things to test the reply form, like 志村喬 or どですかでん.

(By the way, would you mind killing two birds with this single stony topic by mentioning your favourite book of Naguib Mahfouz? – Sadly, my egyptian contemporary knowledge is nearly non-existent.)

そのシステムは現在とてもうまく動いている (I might of used to wrong kanji for “work” -what do I know.)

Fabien wrote 1 hour ago:

except for the title bar of the browser window

Firefox 3 supports all languages, I can see the Japanese in my title bar. I never had a problem on this site, but I do have the Japanese language bar running on my computer-maybe that’s why.

It is actually difficult to pick a favourite Mahfouz novel. I have so far mainly read his earlier works, and maybe only half a dozen of them. I have, for example, yet to start the famous Cairo trilogy. Yet, he is among my favourites already.

I love him for his style, and the world that he paints with it, while much of the political and social issues that he tackles probably go unnoticed by me, so different is the post-revolutionary Egypt from my own world. But if you want to start somewhere, novels like The Beggar or Autumn Quail might be good starting points.

About the Japanese in the title of the browser window, I think that you indeed need Japanese language support for Windows (such as the Japanese language bar Jeremy mentions) to be able to see them. The title bar is probably controlled by the Windows interface, and the browser has very little influence on it other than feeding in the title text.

Vili, would you still need to have at least the Japanese language support install on older versions of Windows?

Right now a older computer I’m using with Windows XP SP1 and Firefox 2.0xx is showing “??” instead of Japanese.

My 2 Windows Vista computers work just fine, but I believe Vista has all languages pre-supported.

I have a Windows 2000 computer with IE6 that shows the Japanese correctly, but that does have the Japanese plugin from MicroSoft.

The script for the author’s name appears fine on all computers.

Thanks for the information, Jeremy! I’m afraid I have no idea what’s the problem there.

I actually tested this page today with a machine running Windows 2000 (no Japanese language bar), and the characters displayed just fine. It might be that XP SP1 is indeed at fault — I run XP SP2 myself without problems.

There could be other reasons as well such as mangled fonts or a partial UTF-8 support. Did you happen to check if the page was indeed rendered in UTF-8 (View > Character Encoding)? It is strange that the Arabic text would print out but not the Japanese.

Oh well, at least the other characters displayed ok, so I think we can live with some question marks. But do let me know if you see some further oddities, or figure out what the problem is!