Japanese Pack 1.3.7 (Crystal Koi)

I want to change some of the labels on the address form, etc., but no matter what text editor I use or text encoding I select, all I see is a string of seemingly random characters. Is this a problem on my end or is there something I need to know about working with Japanese in php?

You can use dreamweaver. This is a common problem when you 1st start with Japanese and php.

Open dreamweaver then go to Modify>Page Properties>Title/Encoding>Encoding> Japanese EUC

All should work from there, let me know if that doesn't.

CK

Ahh, I had tried UTF-8, Shift_JIS, and Mac Japanese, but I missed EUC. Thanks muchly.

Well I fixed the htmlarea problems I was having. I detailed my fix here:

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?p=388425#post388425

I guess it was host related because it depended on how my host gives me access to my files through the shared ssl cert which led to the paths not being written correctly when you have your admin all protected with ssl.

I was getting annoyed at dealing with multiple character sets, so I switched everything over to Unicode. I had to reinstall Zen Cart on my server, but since my site's not live yet and I'm doing all my development on a local server, for me, at least, it was a trivial matter. Anyway, if anyone else is interested, I've zipped up the necessary files to create a completely Unicode-friendly install of Zen Cart. From my brief testing, everything seems to be in order.

http://phreakymonkey.googlepages.com/unicodejapanesepack.zip

This pack includes a copy of CrystalKoi's pack. I have simply converted all files to Unicode, and changed the necessary lines so that your store will serve as UTF-8. Hopefully I didn't miss anything...

It also includes a copy of the Unicode install pack I found here, which will allow you to create your MySQL tables in Unicode when installing Zen Cart.

Have you tested this unicode on a computer other than yours, both English and Japanese OS?

If you have a link to a test site, can you pm it to me? I would love to explore this option for the pack and further development of the pack. Also test the emails and such in diffrent email clients. I will reserch this more, and thanks for the idea.

Actually after looking in to using UTF-8 for encoding, might not be the best option. I need to find more facts about it, and I am up to hearing what others have to say on this subject, but as for now I am going to keep the pack we are making in EUC. If anyone has any good facts on this, I am all ears!

Regards,
CK

After I made that post I came across some search results that lead me away from UTF-8. I am no expert on this, so If someone can tell me other reasons for it, that would be great. Here are links and copies of some of what I have come across. (edit...really hard to read so here are the links.)

http://people.debian.org/~kubota/unicode-symbols.html

http://people.debian.org/~kubota/unicode-symbols-3.1.1.html

As I said, I'm not testing on a live site, but I was running into issues with certain characters displaying strangely because I have some Japanese characters on the English side and vice versa, which is why I went through and changed everything.
I'm no expert on encodings either, but I'd rather not have to deal with incompatibilities. Perhaps it will turn out to be a bad idea, but it's easy enough to change it back.

Those articles you linked to are six years old and there have been two major version changes since then, so it is likely that any serious issues have been ironed out at this point. But it would probably be wiser to solicit the advice of someone who actually knows what they're talking about, because I certainly don't. :D

Phreakymonkey, 6 years..thats a good point. I will look into it more, as for posting Japanese in English, yeah thats a problem and maybe you have the best solution there. Really isn't a topic that I have seen much info on. When I get the time I will go through and research it more and post back. I guess I should have taken more time there to really read more into it.

Let us know please and also if you have a test site up with it on, I would love to see it.

Regards,
CK

The main problem I was having is that certain fields in the admin area aren't able to be changed on a per-language basis, which makes certain symbols go weird at times.

I've set up a test store at http://www.phreakymonkey.com/unicodetest/

Under the featured products, I've modified the product 'Rope', so it has Japanese and English characters and symbols for both languages. You'll also notice the yen symbols in the currency dropdown menus and in the price, with both the ¥ on the left and the kanji on the right (goofy looking, but there for demonstration purposes). Here's a screenshot of what it should look like. Post if your browser displays it differently. If you don't have Japanese languages installed, Japanese characters will probably be displayed as question marks.

I'll send you an admin password so you can poke around, Crystal.

Thanks for this pack. I have installed it.

How do I use it? ie how do I switch from English to Japanese on the site?

I'd like to do this with flags, like this site http://plamoya.com/

Thanks

Localization>Languages

Tools>Layout Boxes Controller (sideboxes/languages.php)

You need to turn the language sidebox on, that will add the flag. You should also install the language under the localization menu.

make any necessary changes

Name: Japanese

Code:ja

Image:icon.gif

Directory:japanese

Sort Order: (1 or 2 which every you want)

Hope that gets you going..please not the pack is still in beta. We are currently going through an install of this pack on a site we are building and should have final updates to the pack soon, exact date I do not yet know but I hope with in the next 2 weeks.

CK

Thanks CrystalKoi.

Managed to install your pack. Found the language sidebox too.

All good, thanks very much.

Hi guys, I've encoutered a problem when adding a Japanese category name. The name is made up with 8 JPN characters, but only 4 are kept after pressing the "save" button, (the English category works fine at any length) does anyone know how I can solve this problem? Thanks for your help.

hajiyama:

Hi guys, I've encoutered a problem when adding a Japanese category name. The name is made up with 8 JPN characters, but only 4 are kept after pressing the "save" button, (the English category works fine at any length) does anyone know how I can solve this problem? Thanks for your help.
DId you have the cart in English or Japanese when you did this?

Hi Crystal, Godspeed and others

I've installed the pack and most things are brilliant.

So far just 2 notes to report. See my working site as to what I mean: http://www.untitled-project.com/zen-cart-jp/

1. The 'signup' button in Japanese is missing or broken link. This is needed when you have the split signup/signin form switched on. To see what I mean, visit link above, add something to cart, and go to checkout. You get 2 options - to signup or login with existing details. Signup button is missing from box on the left.

2. Japanese is appearing over the top of English in white!? (Only in firefox). Again, To see what I mean, visit link above, add something to cart, and go to checkout. You get 2 options - to signup or login with existing details. The odd white Japanese text is writing over the top of 'new customers' in english...

Thanks for having a look at these. Ill keep posting if I run into anything more

R :)

2 richter

This is happening because of two errors in the includes/languages/japanese/login.php file.

The white text is simply asking customers to sign in and is part of the HEADING_TITLE. However it drops down because that definition (line 11) has a line break in it (the <br /> tag). Replace this with a space and the first problem will clear up.

The second problem is that you have English text there. This would seem to be because the translation for split logins has not yet been done (line 14 and 17), though you should be able to simply insert the normal text from line 13 for the first instance, and I suspect that the second may prove to be more difficult unless Express Checkout is now available for Japanese customers.

BTW. Love the direction the site is taking. Wonderfully effective gradients.

Hmm. It might be too strong to call these errors. In designs where the header can expand vertically, the first would be fine.