On 5/2/2006 1:58 PM, Mark Crispin wrote:
> I just discovered something about Japanese Windows that may be useful to
> pass on to other non-Japanese who use Japanese software on Windows.
>
> Even though my laptop (a Victor MP-XP741) is a proper Japanese PC with
> Japanese Windows as the OS, I had problems with some Japanese software
> displaying characters correctly. Most software had no problem.
>
> However, some texts of Norton Anti-Virus, 携快電話, and WinDVD
> would display as a string of "?" or other incorrect characters. It was
> only some texts, not all texts in the application. I suffered with this
> problem for over a year before I finally discovered the cause.
>
> When a person uses a foreign Windows PC, he will usually use the Regional
> and Language Options (地域と言語のオプション) control panel to be
> in his native language environment.
>
> One of these areas in this control panel is Standards and Formats
> (標準と形式), which set the way that numbers, currency, dates,
> and the time are displayed. For convenience, there is drop-down menu
> of languages that will set all of these at once to the form preferred
> in that language. Not surprisingly, I changed this from 日本語
> to 英語（米国）on my laptop.
>
> This was the cause of the problem. Apparently, some buggy text output
> routines use the "language" in Standards and Formats to set the script
> for text to be output. This is completely wrong; software should always
> output text in the script of that text. It certainly should not use a
> convenience dropdown in Standards and Formats for that purpose!
>
> The solution, for a gaijin using a Japanese Windows PC, is NOT to set
> the language in 標準と形式 to his native language. Instead, leave
> it set as 日本語, and then use the クスタマイズ button to
> change each of the various standards and formats individually to the
> form that is preferred in his native language.
>
>
> By the way, in multi-lingual versions of Windows, there is a setting,
> under Language (言語) in the Regional and Language Options
> (地域と言語のオプション) control panel, to set the language for
> menus and dialog. That is the correct way to set the language in a
> multi-lingual environment.
>
> Single-language versions do not have this option; I don't think
> that Japanese Windows exists except as a single-language version.
> However, English Windows with a language pack adds it.
>
> -- Mark --
>
> http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
> Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
> Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Maybe useful.... Thanks!!!