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Japanese characters????

B

bluemonkey

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 19, 2004
108
0
Knoxville, TN USA Near Oak Ridge. Never heard of O
One of my clients is a large manufacturing facility that is Japanese owned, and every business card has the employee's name in english with the Japanese characters below that. They send me an excel file with the necessary information, and I have to use a pee cee to copy the Japanese characters from Excel and Paste them into Illustrator, where I convert them to outlines. Is there a way to do this on the mac. I racked my brains, and I couldn't get it to work. I HATE depending on a PC for anything, and would like to find a Mac fix for this.

Would Office X's version of Excel do it for me? It'd be a worthy investment, yes?

Thanks,
Jason
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At this point, you'll have to wait for Office 2004 for Mac for Asian character support, since Unicode support in Office X is pretty much non-existent.

Good luck!
 
Yeah, Office for Mac has been hampered for quite a while now. Luckily, TextEdit in Panther can work with Word files and unicode characters just fine - but that doesn't help you with Excel files.

You never know, someone might have a solution, but as far as I know you'll have to wait a few months.
 
Yeah, Office has major problems with Asian text, and although 2004 promises improvements, MS has botched it so badly up till now I'm not holding my breath.

Actually, though, I thought that Office X for the Mac was capable of reading Japanese documents created on the PC... I'm pretty sure I've seen others do it. Seems to be a problem specific to Excel; I can create Japanese text in a Word document so long as I put up with MS's silly font and encoding system, but I can't figure out how to get Excel to display Japanese characters.

I don't have the office language register program handy (it's one of the extras on the CD), but you could try running it on Excel and see if it's possible to switch Excel to a Japanese mode. That might render it able to display Japanese text--it's worth a shot, anyway.
 
I'm pretty sure Mac Office X supports Japanese characters. I know because I've tried looking under the "language" menu for Chinese characters, and Japanese is all they give me.
 
Yep, I just checked. If you're willing to get Office X, and you've got Japanese fonts installed on your system (on by default), and you install the Microsoft Langauge Register extra, AND you use that to set Excel as a Japanese langauge application, you'll be able to read and write Japanese text in an Excel spreadsheet (and the menus don't change, so you can still read it). This should work with documents created on a PC as well.

From there, you can copy and paste text into whatever can display it.

Alternate suggestions: It'd be nice if OpenOffice worked, but I have my doubts. Would it be possible to get the text sent to you as a Word document, though? It appears that the version of TextEdit in 10.3 is capable of reading Japanese langauge .doc files properly.

Otherwise, looks like a copy of Office is in your future.
 
Thanks for all your help, guys. I have put in a request for Office 2004 when it comes out next month. My boss said "Is it available now?". I told her it wasn't, and she said "If it's not available now, then I don't care. Talk to me when it is available". Ain't she sweet?

I guess I'll continue to use the old Dell for now...

-Jason
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