Michael W. Martin > For a device that will print a relatively basic label (such > as sequence > number, date, time, name, department, etc) onto a document in > Japanese -- > what is your consensus? Basic Kanji+Hiragana+Katakana.... or will > Hiragana+Katakana or just Katakana suffice? My vote is that kanji are definitely needed in a decent application, in year 2000. If your customers would accept a katakana-only system, I bet that they would also accept an English-only system... The Hiragana+katakana solution sounds odd to me (I naively associate hiragana with kanji). The number field presumably uses western digits. Date and time field only need a handful of kanji for "year", "month", "day", "hour", "minute", etc. But these *have* to be used: even if everything else is in katakana, a Japanese would expect to see these very basic kanji. (E.g., I have an old Japanese pocket computer whose single-byte character set includes katakana, a few graphic symbols *and* the dozen-less kanjis needed in dates). About the name and department fields, you should be more precise: 1) Is the name a person's name (e.g. the customer) or does it come from a small closed set (e.g. the device's model name, the film type, the description of requested processing, etc.)? 2) What is the department field: a number or an "alpha"-numeric string? 3) Where do these strings come from (e.g. static text, or typed on the device itself, or uploaded from a remote computer)? If people's or places' names are involved, you have no choice: you have to implement at *least* the whole JIS X 0208 set (and, BTW, this is not even enough to protect yourself from occasional complaints from people whose name contain unusual kanji). Question 3 is particularly important, because if the text is arbitrary and it is typed on a standard computer, your device necessarily needs to support the same character set as the host -- unless you also write the host application and its input method, and can thus impose your limits at the source. _ Marco
