I know this is a Mac site, but...

[Invizzible]

I'm a Mac user who's trying to get Windows XP on my hardly-ever-used PC to write and display Japanese text (for my girlfriend - so she can use my PC for emailing instead of kicking me off my Mac).

After much hassle, I finally got it to give her the 3 character sets she needs (Romaji, Hiragana, and Katakana). It works for reading Japanese websites and it gives her the characters she needs to write emails in Japanese. Unfortunately, when she emails her Japanese friends, the emails arrive with unreadable nonsense characters (this happens when she emails their cell phones, so it's not a Windows setting on the receiving end).

Has anyone had this problem, and managed to figure it out? Needless to say getting it to work on my Mac was a simple matter of a couple mouse clicks in System Preferences. But I'd like to have my Mac back, because she sends lots of looooong emails which uses up time I could be on the computer.

 

[SiliconAddict]

I'm a Mac user who's trying to get Windows XP on my hardly-ever-used PC to write and display Japanese text (for my girlfriend - so she can use my PC for emailing instead of kicking me off my Mac).

After much hassle, I finally got it to give her the 3 character sets she needs (Romaji, Hiragana, and Katakana). It works for reading Japanese websites and it gives her the characters she needs to write emails in Japanese. Unfortunately, when she emails her Japanese friends, the emails arrive with unreadable nonsense characters (this happens when she emails their cell phones, so it's not a Windows setting on the receiving end).

Has anyone had this problem, and managed to figure it out? Needless to say getting it to work on my Mac was a simple matter of a couple mouse clicks in System Preferences. But I'd like to have my Mac back, because she sends lots of looooong emails which uses up time I could be on the computer.

Might want to contact MS. We had a user in the office who needed a regionalized version of Windows. They simply sent us a CD with the OS on it. Since CD's != a license MS is pretty good about sending out such things as long as you pay the shipping and handling.

 

[Makosuke]

Y'know, I worked with a friend for a while trying to get their XP Home box to properly e-mail Japanese text, and while getting it to display text in a browser is easy (that works all the way back to Win98/NT4), the e-mail thing I never did get functioning properly (even sending mail to other Windows users).

One thing to try is to see if you can set the encoding system for the e-mail being sent; Outlook and OE handle it differently, but probably default to something that the cellphone readers can't handle (unicode, maybe); try using Shift-JIS or ISO 2022-JP and see if that helps any.

Better yet, try a different e-mail client than whatever she's using; Thunderbird seems ok if she's already on OE/Outlook, otherwise try the other way around, or maybe even a Japanese-centric mail program (they do exist).

I've got to admit, though, the multilingual capabilities of Windows are there, but they're a joke compared to the MacOS; Windows now feels like it's just a little past where OS9 was, where OSX is truly multilingual; identical in every country, and you just tell it what language is your default at install (or later).

In case you can't tell, I love OSX's Japanese capabilities.

 

[5300cs]

Uhhh .. what he said ^^^ Most of the problems I had were because the encoding was set wrong.

Slightly off-topic, but I noticed that I cannot email my wife in Japanese to her cell phone with Mail in Tiger. It comes out all jumbled up, where it worked fine in Panther Even with the encoding set.

Oh yeah by the way, the Japanese term for garbled characters is "mojibake". Don't confuse that and say "mojibaka" as some people I know have