Windows locale troubles

March 22, 2005 1:01 PM

?????! I can type in Japanese and have a slightly broken OS as a result.

I'm running win2k, and I've installed the Japanese input option, which works great. The catch is that in certain contexts, certain extended ASCII characters are displayed as Japanese characters; for example, my command prompt is "C:¥>". This I can cope with. The problem is that:

1) Certain apps (mostly ones written in Java, so far) assume I want a Japanese interface. I do not.

2) Playing Nethack is a living hell.

Chances are at this point you're nodding your head and saying, "This is easy! He's got his locale set to Japan!", but no, it's clearly set as English (United States).

posted by squidlarkin to computers & internet (6 comments total)

?????! clearly spelled "konnichiwa" on preview. I even used the cut-and-paste workaround.
posted by squidlarkin at 1:02 PM on March 22, 2005

Just so that you don't lose the Japanese functionality, which I assume you want, create a new user account called "Japanese" or whatever. You'll log into this account whenever you want to do things in Japanese. Then go to start -> control panel -> regional and language options.

You've said that you've already got "Standards and formats" set to "English (United States)", so that's good. Now, go to the language tab. Under "Text services and input languages," click the "details" button and make sure "default input language" is "English (United States) - US". Hit ok. Go to the "advanced" tab and make sure "Language for non-Unicode programs" is set to "English (United States)".

Now log into your Japanese account and go through all those steps, but set things to Japanese.

Now - if all those things are already as described, say so here. The settings described really ought to fix things, but with windows, who knows? Also, the only computers I've got access to are XP, so the buttons and boxes may not have exactly the same names, but it should be similar enough for you to figure out if they're not.
posted by kavasa at 1:45 PM on March 22, 2005

Eh, thanks for trying, but the win2k settings actually bear no resemblance to what you just described. Anyone else?
posted by squidlarkin at 2:12 PM on March 22, 2005

Yeah, they like to move the system codepage setting around in each Windows rev, and give it a new woolly-sounding name to prevent you from working out it's the system codepage setting. This is Microsoft Fun Game! OK!

In 2K: Start->Settings->Control Panel->Regional Options->General->Set default...->Japanese.

And yes, lots of applications will stupidly decide this means you want a Japanese interface (grrr), and you'll meet the sad backslash/yen issue (which is perfectly fixable now we've got Unicode, but turns out the Japanese are actually used to it and find the backslash odd, grrrrrr), and all your fonts will go funny, breaking any applications that rely on fixed sizes (grrrrrrrrr).

It would be nice if Japanese apps justed worked with wide characters (Unicode) thus making all this unnecessary. However many native Japplications are usability disaster zones that have barely heard of Windows 95, let alone 2000. It is very frustrating.
posted by BobInce at 11:46 PM on March 22, 2005

That oddly placed "Set default..." button was the key. ??????????!
posted by squidlarkin at 9:27 AM on March 23, 2005

... dammit. I meant "Thanks".
posted by squidlarkin at 9:27 AM on March 23, 2005