# ???? in posts



## kats

I am new to the forum and also not very computer savvy so please bear with me:

What are all the question marks in the posts?  I thought it was where posters had used Japanese kana or kanji, so I added the Firefox extension that I found in the resources.  It doesn't help.  Can anyone tell me how to view the characters?  (I use Firefox.)  Thanks.


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## karuna

I use Firefox too and can see kanas and kanji without problems. My guess is that you don't have a Unicode font with Japanese tables installed. Probably you can go to Control Panel>Regional and Language Options>Languages and check the box below "Install files for East Asian Languages". Then you may need to insert Windows installation CD.


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## kats

Thanks; it worked!  Any tips on how to use that to type kana?


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## ireney

Kats try the encoding first. Sometimes this works (for some impossible-for-me-to-understand reason) my browser(s) refuse sometimes prefers to show squiggles instead of _Greek_ (note my location and you'll understand why I find this strange). Changing the encoding helps.


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## kats

Thank you Ireney.  I am sorry to say that I don't know how encoding works.  I found "character encoding" under "view" in my toolbar, but I'm really not sure what to do with it!  

Next to "Japanese" in the dropdown menu is "Shift JIS."  If I click on Japanese, the page refreshes.  Then when I start typing, it's in the roman type again.  When I check back to the encoding menu, "western" is checked again.  If I try "shift JIS" still the roman letters get typed.

I am a virtual ignoramus.


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## karuna

kats said:


> Thanks; it worked!  Any tips on how to use that to type kana?



Install Japanese keyboard first. To do this go to the Contral Panel>Regional and Language Options>Languages. Now press Details and Add buttons and choose Japanese. Also select "Show language bar on the desktop" in Language Bar section. Then to be able to type kanas in your application, switch to Japanese and select Katakana or other option in the Language bar panel.


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## Jana337

kats said:


> Thank you Ireney.  I am sorry to say that I don't know how encoding works.  I found "character encoding" under "view" in my toolbar, but I'm really not sure what to do with it!
> 
> Next to "Japanese" in the dropdown menu is "Shift JIS."  If I click on Japanese, the page refreshes.  Then when I start typing, it's in the roman type again.  When I check back to the encoding menu, "western" is checked again.  If I try "shift JIS" still the roman letters get typed.
> 
> I am a virtual ignoramus.


Encoding: You have to experiment sometimes. For some pages, Unicode performs well. But quite frequently, you will have to click on Others (I am sorry, my browser is not in English so I am just translating) and test other Japanese-friendly encodings in the East-Asian section.

For typing, read this thread.



Jana


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## kats

Thank you both.  I've tried everything you said and I'm ready to give up until another day.
Thank you very much.


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## ireney

kats encoding works just for reading, not for writing. I didn't realise you also wanted to write in Japanese. 

For doing that follow karuna's instructions

However, even if you have everything set-up correctly you may still not be able to see the characters in all the sites you visit.

The browser I use right now (Opera) has 
"automatic detection"
Shift JiS
ISO-2022-JP
EUC-JP

Since most browsers have options (of the kind) similar to each other maybe your browser has more too (firefox is the only one of the most popular ones I haven't installed)

If one doesn't work try another one.


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## sneeka2

Just to help kats understand what's going on:

In a computer there are many ways to represent any single letter. To you, it all looks just like a letter. But the computer is working with limited resources and so ultimately has to store the letters internally as some form of 1's and 0's. Thanks to many different people trying many different approaches there are a multitude of ways to "encode" any given letter into 1's and 0's today. A given letter might be 11101100001001011 in one encoding and 00100100100011 in another. Your browser tries it's best to guess which encoding a given text is in, but sometimes it gets it wrong and shows you a different character than the one that it was intended to be. That's why you need to choose the encoding by hand sometimes. But I think that's not related to your writing Japanese problem at all now.

Cheers.


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## karuna

Even when you have switched to the Japanese keyboard input (JP shows in your language bar in lower-left corner) you may still need to press Alt-~ to switch between Latin and IME input. Then after typing the word and pressing space bar it will automatically make conversion into kanji unless you change keyboard driver settings.


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## timpeac

Hi. Some lessons at the bottom of this page might help.

http://www.coscom.co.jp/help3/jpfont/jpfont.html


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## kats

ありがとう　　　　Thank you very much!

Kats


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