How can I get windows to always display Japoanese fonts correctly online?

September 16, 2010 10:31 AM

Windows doesn't always display Japanese fonts correctly on web pages, how can I fix it?

Most website display the fonts correctly, but occassionally I get one like this
I have Japanese added as a keyboard - is there anything else I should do?

Running Windows 7 64 bit - same problem in Firefox and IE

posted by mairuzu to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Response by poster: obviously the headline question should read Japanese!
posted by mairuzu at 10:32 AM on September 16, 2010

Best answer: In IE you can go to the View menu, then Encoding, then Japanese (Auto-Select). In Firefox there's a similar setting (I don't have Firefox on my work PC or I'd be more specific).

Very occasionally Auto-Select doesn't work, and then I can usually get it to display by running through the various Japanese encoding methods (Euc, Shift-JIS).
posted by Jeanne at 10:37 AM on September 16, 2010

Your "like this" link doesn't really help us because we have no idea what that page looks like to you. If you see some of the glyphs but not all (i.e. some are blank boxes), then you're probably missing a font that you need to install. If you see no glyphs at all, then it's probably an encoding detection issue.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:45 AM on September 16, 2010

To get your example page to display properly in Firefox, I had to click on the following:

View, Character Encoding, More Encodings, East Asian, Japanese (Shift_JIS)
posted by JaredSeth at 10:50 AM on September 16, 2010

Best answer: BTW that page specifies no encoding in the HTML and the server includes no encoding information in the HTTP headers, so it's purely up to the browser to guess the encoding, Shift_JIS in this case. I'm running a very old version of Firefox and it was able to correctly guess the encoding when set to Universal under Auto-Detect.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:53 AM on September 16, 2010

Best answer: For the page you linked to, the character encoding is set wrong. The server is saying it's being sent as ISO-8859-1, which is only good for western languages, but it's actually in Shift-JIS, a somewhat older Japanese encoding. So, you can manually tell your browser that it's Shift-JIS to get it to display correctly. However, you can tell Firefox to auto-detect the encoding even when it's sent erroneously. View->Character Encoding->Auto Detect->Universal got the page to show up correctly for me.
posted by zsazsa at 10:53 AM on September 16, 2010

How did you arrive at that conclusion? There is no 'charset=' in the Content-Type header:

$ curl -s -o /dev/null -D - http://www.yasashi.info/ra_00003g.htm
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:58:08 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.42 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.31 OpenSSL/0.9.8e
Last-Modified: Sat, 29 Sep 2007 23:32:07 GMT
ETag: "4686-46fee077"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 18054
Content-Type: text/html

posted by Rhomboid at 11:02 AM on September 16, 2010

Pretty common problem that is caused by woeful Japanese web standards. Usually the best thing to do is to fiddle with the encoding within whichever browser you are using.
posted by KokuRyu at 11:18 AM on September 16, 2010

Rhomboid: I came to that conclusion by talking out of my ass. I just assumed that the server was specifying ISO 8859-1. You're right.
posted by zsazsa at 11:22 AM on September 16, 2010

Response by poster: view>character encoding>auto-detect>japanese did the trick perfectly.

many thanks for the (as always) fantastically speedy responses!

resolved
posted by mairuzu at 11:47 AM on September 16, 2010