Re: Shift_JIS conflict with CSS?

From: Shez (UseReplyAddress_at_nospam.uk.invalid)
Date: 08/31/04 

Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 20:09:21 +0100

In the faraway land of sci.lang.japan, dc <d3ntaku@gmail.com> said:
>> > And never use SJIS, I would suggest web pages be encoded in UTF-8.
>> > This time encoding has nothing to do with it, but it may be the culprit
>> next
>> > time.
>
>I havent found a nice way to edit pages in UTF-8 yet. If I use a
>wysiwyg program, (like http://nvu.com/ ) then when the same page is
>opened in a text editor, all the J-text is #0123 ugly. Even though
>S-Jis may be getting phased out, for now its a lot more convenient.

You can use JWPce, though it's a pain if you want to include proper
punctuation etc in mixed language webpages, as it doesn't have smart
quotes so you have to pick them from the charmap. It's fine as a
Japanese text editor for HTML though, and can convert character sets
automatically, you just load a file in one format (e.g. Shift JIS) and
then it save as another (eg. UTF-8) (you need to change your charset
header in the HTML manually though).

I've just been trying out the Open Office (aka Star Office) HTML editor,
and if you set it to save as UTF-8 (under Tools > Options > Load/Save >
HTML) then it saves everything correctly, and unlike JWPce it has smart
quotes (which are also saved as the correct unicode byte sequences,
unlike many editors that dump them out in Windows-1252 or &#charcode
strings).

In order for Japanese to display correctly in the source view, you need
to be sure to set a suitable font in Tools > Options > OpenOffice >
Fonts, and also enable Asian languages in the Languages section.

Since I only got Open Office yesterday I haven't found out if I can
input Japanese text via an IME, at the moment the only way I've figured
is to use the "special character" menu, which gives you a charmap. It's
actually quite good for kana though as you can see them all in one grid
and just use it like a little keyboard and tap out a kana string for
insertion. (Kanji is obviously going to be a pain that way though,
unless you know your way around a huge unicode table!) I haven't managed
to find a Japanese spelling dictionary for it either, the one I got
yesterday from the Japanese Open Office site turned out to be a set of
Western spelling dictionaries with installation instructions translated
into Japanese!

Anyhow, Open Office doesn't add the masses of crap to your HTML that a
lot of WYSIWYG editors or office type software do either (well only a
little bit), although it does have some flaws: I found it stripped out
all the "title" fields from my tags and also lost all the acronyms and
spans for some reason. I'm hoping I can fix that somehow, otherwise I'll
only be able to use it for first drafts before I add the extra tags. It
also tries to clean up your code to conform to standards, and turns
external stylesheets into internal ones (better than ignoring them
entirely I suppose).

Anyhow, if anyone has tips on using Open Office (western version) for
mixed language documents and webpages that include Japanese, I'd be
interested to hear them. My needs are basically for English stuff with
proper typographical punctuation etc, and the odd Japanese phrase thrown
in here and there.

-Shez. 

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