> Well well, it looks like I got a lot of replies over the night... well, Japanese encodings are a sort of hobby with me.
> There were two places I've gotten the mojibake text: one was from an email (I > was asking how to make a specific kanji i couldn't find), Which client are you using? If you are using Apple's freebie and it is giving you a lot of garbled Japanese, and you haven't stripped out the internationalization "junk" (as some people call it), setting your system preferences to display Japanese in addition to English should help. The display settings allow you to order the list in the priority you like, which is convenient. You might want to add another user just for working in Japanese. I find it convenient, myself. e-mail headers sometimes get garbled anyway, BTW. > the second was from > file names a japanese friend of mine gave me (mp3). What OS? File names present a special problem once they've been garbled. The best thing may be to just have your friend rename them with romaji before he ships them to you. If you want the kanji/kana names, ask him (her?) to send you an e-mail separately with a list of the names. (We could have fun writing a script or two to help with this, but there's quite a bit of complexity hiding there. But listing the names doesn't require perl. If it's Mac OS, just select all in a finder window and copy.) > As far as typing in > Japanese, I can do that fine (even if I can only seem to do it in the Finder and > in TextEdit). Project Builder's editor will also work well in UTF-16 or UTF-8, if you set the encoding correctly before you start. It seems to need the byte order mark. The Japanese version of AppleWorks has no problems, of course. ;-/ (I'm not going to mention M$ software, but the Japanese version of MSOffice also works rather well for those that like such things.) > I tried copying them over to an html page and tried the three different japanese > encodings Camino offers (ISO 2022-JP, Shift JIS, EUC) as well as unicode (UTF8). I can't imagine that working for file names at all. > ... > I was mainly wondering two things: one if there's a good general > "troubleshooting/doing japanese on OSX" page (I couldn't find any such thing on > Apple's site) or just troubleshooting/doing in general, I keep meaning to write those up. 8-( Right now, I have the impression that your best bet is to just look for general information on Japanese encodings. (I'm still trying to decipher what they've done with the file system, and still trying to figure out how to get the terminal app to show the Japanese names for files. My brother in law has a book that shows a way that is supposed to even get it to show shift-JIS file names correctly in the terminal app, but I haven't got it to work on my iBook yet.) > and two if there was > some place that lists/downloads OSX apps that accept Japanese input. For the > latter I think Ward might have helped with suggesting stuff to do from the > system preferences. Well, you've also got a good start on alternative text editors. If you're planning on making money with Japanese text, I and many others here highly recommend BBEdit. (Of course, this is all off topic unless somebody wants to come up with some perl code for trying to undo garbled file names.) -- Joel Rees <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
