Japanese _and_ English characters

Hi there:

I'm a bit mystified, and have searched the forums but can't find any info...

I'm setting up a new store, and would like to be able to include both Japanese and English characters in product names, descriptions, categories, et cetera. I do not need to localize my installation (ie, allow users to 'switch' languages); I just need to be able to display both types of characters.

Is there an easy way to do this? Have I missed something obvious? :)

Any insight appreciated!

Thanks in advance...

Hi there:

This is a bump...

ANY insight at all would be appreciated, as I'm having difficulty figuring this out.

Thanks again and in advance....

I'm in the middle of adding Japanese to https://www.35north.com, and there isn't a Japanese language pack out there for the lastest version. 1.3.7 or whatever.

So my wife is just typing in the Japanese in the products catalog. We do have English & Japanese set up, but you could just as easily type English and Japanese right into the same one window.

scott_see:

I'm in the middle of adding Japanese to https://www.35north.com, and there isn't a Japanese language pack out there for the lastest version. 1.3.7 or whatever.

So my wife is just typing in the Japanese in the products catalog. We do have English & Japanese set up, but you could just as easily type English and Japanese right into the same one window.

Thanks for the response!

Interesting... Is it my browser setup?

I'm typing japanese characters into the products info (in the admin area), and the characters look fine there. When I update or preview, though, they just turn into question marks...

??

Thanks,

Patrick

http://www.35north.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=8&products_id=5&language=ja

I know this works. See page above.

Here are a few thoughts. My business partner typed the Japanese you see in the above page directly in the Admin > Catalog > Products area.

But since I'm your typical monolinguilstic American, I can only copy and paste Japanese into my site. When I do, sometimes I find the only way to do it is to copy and paste the Japanese into a blank page in Dreamweaver, and then copy the sourcecode into my Zen cart.

See http://www.35north.com/images/screenshot-of DW-ja-en.gif

So I paste what's highlighed in the code view rather than what's in the design view.

But what you're doing "should" work. Maybe its the browser encoding setting you're using? The font? I'm guessing here. But typing Japanese into the product description should work.

Hi Scott:

I appreciate you taking the time to show me the links and screengrab...

I'm mystified a bit! I opened DreamWeaver and created a new page, then "typed" in some Japanese characters... When I switch to code view in DW, all I see is exactly what I typed in. That is, DW isn't automagically encoding the Japanese characters for me.

I can't seem to find a preference in DW to have it auto-rewrite characters' encoding. Have I missed something obvious? I generally use BBEdit, so admit I don't know my way around DW the best. :)

DW also wants me to save the file with UTF-8 encoding (which turnes the Japanese into question marks); When I save it with a Japanese encoding, it shows up fine -- but still just characters, and not encoded in code view.

--
Of course, this is a workaround (and one I can live with, if it works!) -- but I'm still concerned that your business partner can simply type into the product/admin area and get goodness coming out on the other side.

I still can't determine if this is computer-specific, or an issue with my install of ZC.

Ideas, anyone?

Thanks!

The URL of the screenshot is http://www.35north.com/japanese.html

You'll see the encoding is set to iso-8859-1, not that I have a clue what that is.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

Try changing the encoding in page properties, maybe.

I suspect that the solution might be in one of the Window's language bar settings, which I don't pretend to understand, but perhaps it's worth playing around with these?

:-)

Thanks Scott -- Yeah, I've played around with the page's encoding (utf-8, the ISO values, "ja", etc)... No luck here.

Since you're not having issues displaying it, I don't think I should have to do that.

I'll play with my keyboard/language things some more, too. Fingers crossed!

--
I imagine, though, there's got to be a lurking ZenCart Pro who could answer my (our) questions very quickly... Hellooooooo... :)

Cheers,

Patrick

scott_see:

I suspect that the solution might be in one of the Window's language bar settings, which I don't pretend to understand, but perhaps it's worth playing around with these?

Hi again Scott:

Well, I've had some moderate success by changing the encoding while viewing the admin or product page in the browser -- in Safari, I can go to the "View" menu and choose Japanese (EUC) for the text encoding.

While I have the text encoding switched, I can input Japanese characters and safely submit the product in the admin windows -- then I can view it A-OK as well.

It gets a little hairy, because Safari seems to like switching the current text encoding while you surf around; If I'm not careful, I can come back to the product admin page while in English text encoding, and garble up the Japanese. Strange behavior!

I'm still looking for how to get the auto-entity encoding behavior like you seem to have in Dreamweaver...

Cheers,

Patrick