> I have a project that's completed and out the door. Now the > client wants to make a Japanese version. > > 1. Does anyone know of a resource where I can get this > character set (which will work with Director MX)?
On Mac, you can get the Japanese Language kit. On Windows, the best thing to do is develop using Japanese Director on a Japanese Windows system. > 3. Any other pitfalls that anyone is aware of in doing this > conversion? A few. Input is the big gotcha. If your program takes keyboard input, you _MUST_ use the JLK or Japanese Windows. DO NOT let the client talk you into writing something to accept Japanese character input on any Western, single-byte system. Input Method Editors (IMEs) are a big, big issue that C++ programmers have been dealing with for over a decade now. You do NOT want to roll your own. The same thing would go for Chinese and Korean. If you pass text between Director and Flash sprites, be aware that Flash uses Unicode, and Director doesn't. Generally, text you pass from Director to Flash will work ok, though you may have to embed a font. Text passed from Flash to Director will probably fail unless you pass it through a filter first. Beware of search functions. Japanese groups stuff quite differently from Western languages. It's very difficult to tell where a word begins and ends, because spaces are not word demarcations. Character sets. Japanese uses four character sets: kanji (Chinese characters), hiragana and katakana (phonetic Japanese character sets), and romaji (Roman letters). They are mixed freely--it's not uncommon to see a sentence with all four character sets. Directionality. English is left to right. Written Japanese usually is too, but it can also be vertical. Check next month's edition of MX Developer's Journal. I, and a couple other people more expert than I, have written articles on localization, and I think they will appear in the August issue. They were initially slated for July, but for various reasons, got pushed out a month. Cordially, Kerry Thompson [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
