Using non-Roman characters, Can you read this page? Options

[Brian Chandler]

(Here "non-Roman" in practice means Japanese script, but the same would apply to Chinese, Korean, and possibly Russian etc.)

A long time ago, I carefully segregated English and Japanese pages, and if I had to write bits of Japanese on "English" pages, I used images. The reason was that even if support for Japanese fonts was fairly widely available, in some setups a naive visitor reaching the page was not even given a chance to see it in mojibake (q.v. Wikipedia) before being prompted to download possibly enormous "Language packs" and suchlike.

I guess the situation has changed - this is a pure "English" (i.e. US) Suse Linux distribution, and it displays Japanese page out of the box. But I've no idea what happens on the world's most widely used operating systems...

Please check if you can display the 'Translation guide' for this puzzle correctly:

http://imaginatorium.org/shop/nota.htm#A10477

If in doubt, here's a screenshot of what it should like:
http://imaginatorium.org/private/xln.png

I'd be grateful for feedback; please say what OS you're using, and particularly if you can find something that _doesn't_ display ok. Otherwise, I'm thinking of just using Japanese characters freely (as Wikipedia does, for example) - any comments?

Question 2: What's the current situation on macrons? (I'm still using substitute circumflexes.)

[Frederiek]

The following screenshot is what I see in Mac OS 40.4.10/Safari 2.0.4. Some seem correct, but not all, as far as I can see.

[Peter1968]

I don't have any east Asian support added, so they're all unknown character glyphs. I could easily add them but I have no need for them.

Like this on any browser I have and I'm using Win XP.

[Darin McGrew]

I get unknown-character glyphs at home (Win/ME), and correct characters at work (Mac, Linux).

[Brian Chandler]

Thanks for the feedback!

I get unknown-character glyphs at home (Win/ME), and correct characters at work (Mac, Linux).

Hmm. But Frederiek had exactly one character missing: sen, or 1/100 of a yen. This looks as though it isn't used in Chinese, which might have something to do with it. Bottom line is that Unicode is all a bit of a mess, by necessity rather than maldesign.

I get quite a lot of mail from people pasting in bits of Japanese websites, sometimes slightly, other times totally mangled, but unfortunately they usually just say "I can't read it", rather than explaining whether it was mojibake or whatever.

It looks as though there's no more of this prompting to download huge extensions, at least... ?

Anyway, since the page I showed is a key to something printed, perhaps I'll change it to images; and just use text when talking about text on Japanese websites, so that with luck, any mangling will be the same on both...