Japanese under Windows

Introduction

Most freeware/shareware solutions offer crapy bitmap fonts instead of nice True-Type fonts, and do not offer any good IME/FEP to input Japanese (eg. you have to convert each word to Japanese instead of typing a whole sentence.) But then, writing TT fonts and an IME for Far-East languages is a lot of work, so you get what you pay for.

To view Japanese in Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, just dowload the MSIE IME package (Win 9x and NT4), which will install a couple of Japanese TT fonts. To enable Japanese in Windows 2000, go to Control Panel | Keyboard, and add Japanese/Japanese Input. A free web browser for Asian languages is NJStar Asian Explorer. For other applications, you can run a separate application like NJWin. As explained, the font is pretty ugly, but it gets the job done. Another viewer is MView.

Another Japanese-capable web browse is Tabibito... which is no longer available here.

To type Japanese, the IME package only works in MS apps like Outlook Express. I don't know if it's a Unicode issue, or because MS really wants you to buy the localized version of Windows. Alternatives are JWP and JWPce (the names are close, but the code is different), NJStar, NJCOM (NJStar Communicator). Products from NJ are obviously biased toward Chinese, but they also support Japanese and Korean. Another Japanese-capable word processor is TwinBridge. Another is Lava Software's Japanese WordMage. Neocor J-Text. KanjiKit. I don't the difference betwee, NJStar and NJCom (maybe the latter is more recent.) Free Light Sofware.

To write applications that support Far-East languages (and, hopefully, any language supported by Unicode): Rosette, a C++ Unicode library from BasisTech. BasisTech also provides a DOS program and a .DLL to convert from/to Unicode, uniconv.exe and btuc21d3.dll.

To convert Japanese text between the other encoding systems (JIS, Shift-JIS, and EUC), use Ken Laux's Kakitori.

Most of the above are available at ftp://ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/