Japanese characters on a Western/American keyboard

[Flying Mullet]

Does anyone know if there's a way to type hiragana/katakana on an Western/American keyboard? I have the language support installed so that windows will display the characters, but I don't know how to type them. I didn't know if there's anything like "Alt+###" or such that will let me type the characters.

[Bulldog]

If you're using XP, there's some IME thingy you have to activate or something.
I forgot if it's like that in the other versions of Windows, although I suspect 2000 to be exactly the same.

[Endless]

If you properly installed the IME (which is a different thing than laguage support), you will have in your toolbar an icon which will say US (assuming you're using an US keyboard). Left click on it, and it shoud prompt you to choose between US and JP, select JP, then if yuo don't see it, move that part of the toolbar so it shows all of it (you might need to click in an editable window) and select (for example) "full-width katakana", then you text will be typed in phonetics, which you can choose to change between hiragana to katakana to kanji.

Example:
Ž„‚̓}ƒXƒeƒ‹ƒ”ƒBƒ”ƒB‚Å‚·�B

*tests more*
私はマステルヴィヴィです。

Edit: *attempts to fix*
For some reason, mine types the text, not the html code for it. If you select to display the page with Japanese coding, it works, though.
Edit2: *tries posting using iso*

[Bulldog]

Whatever you wrote in the last part of your post Master Vivi, I can't view it. Does Opera support japanese? Hiragan, katakana...kanji?

Edit: Dude, you have to smack up Control Panel and dobbleclick "Regional and Language Options" something should pop up, and there should be a tab called "Languages", in the "Languages" menu a button labeled "Details" should be there. That's right: Press it. Fool around and see if it works.

[Flying Mullet]

Okay, I'm using Windows 2000. When I went out to download the Global IME it said that Windows 2000 already has the support installed, I just had to specify that I want to use it(In the Regional Settings in the Control Panel). Thanks for your help everyone! :)

ありがと :D

[Bulldog]

You're welcome...not that I actually helped, but I'll take the credit anyway.

[crono_logical]

Originally posted by Master Vivi
Edit: *attempts to fix*
For some reason, mine types the text, not the html code for it. If you select to display the page with Japanese coding, it works, though. Seems to depend if you're viewing the page in Western or Japanese when you post. If you're in Western, it converts to the codes, otherwise if you're browser if viewing in Japanese, it'll post straight as Japanese.

If you go to edit your post and change the view mode in between, you can get both types in the same post :p

[Endless]

It seems that posting using the windows coding for Western makes it go wrong, whereas switching to ISO when posting makes it work.

[Dr Unne]

How is Windows support for Unicode (UTF-8)? If you use UTF-8 you shouldn't have all those problems with encodings, right? UTF-8 handles all language character sets, all in one huge nice encoding. UTF-8 = good.

[crono_logical]

よ�。�れ�UTF-8��


EDIT: It works if you post in that encoding, then view in that encoding afterwards, it seems - view in anthing else, and it screws up. Seems this thread'll confuse a few browsers now there's posts in multiple encodings in here, at least one post has unreadable stuff in it for me now depending on how I'm viewing the thread :p

It also seems that I have to force the correct encoding view when editing too, otherwise I get garbage in the editbox where I edit my post :p

[Dr Unne]

I can't read your last post no matter which encoding I try. This is too confusing for me. Ah well, not like I need to type anything in Japanese anyways. I still recommend using UTF-8 though. If everyone posted everything in UTF-8, everyone could then view everything in UTF-8 too no matter which language it was, and it'd all just work fine. I can browse Google and read Hebrew and Greek and Russian and Chinese all on the same page if it's in UTF-8, but if they each used a specific encoding for their own language I could only read one langauge at a time.

[Endless]

I can read clout's last post if I use UTF-8 to read the page.

[Dr Unne]

OK, strangely enough I can read it if I highlight the text, but if I don't highlight it it's invisible. What the heck. Maybe it's a bug in Firebird.

[Flying Mullet]

What is everyone trying to type? I'm using Firebird and I can see what everyone is typing, although in some posts I am seeing Roman characters with accents and such, then in others it's Japanese characters.