Wikipedia:Technical assistance for katakana

If you have read our article on Katakana, we can only assume that you are interested in seeing what the Katakana look like. Unfortunately, many web browsers and operating systems are not set up by default to render these characters properly. In futherance of our dedication to the enhancement of knowledge, we provide this forum for you to ask questions.

Below you will find several operating system and browser combinations. If you are having trouble, this is a good place to start. If the advice given doesn't work for you, leave a note with as many details as possible.

Remember, there are only volunteers here, so if you don't get an answer right away, don't get upset.

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Hello, Jimbo Wales here. I'm a macho Linux guy, but at home, I'm almost ashamed to admit, I use a very girlie-girl pink iMac. Even worse, perhaps, I use it like a toaster oven, in the sense that I haven't bothered learning the least thing about the technical operation. I do enough computer geek stuff at work!

(I also do enough Wikipedia stuff at work, so what am I doing here at night? But that's another story for my next Wikipediaholics Anonymous meeting.)

I use Netscape as my browser, and my wife uses IE. We are running MacOS 8.6. What do we need to do to make the Katakana page render correctly. --Jimbo Wales

You need to install Japanese Language Kit. It is a optional install on the MacOS 8.5 or MacOS 9 Installer, which you can get to by launching the OS 8.5 / 9 installer and choosing custom install. -- Olof

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To get Japanese characters to display correctly on a windows system (in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and recent Netscape browsers simply visit a japanese web page with Internet Explorer. You should get an install-on-demand dialog-box that asks if you want to install Japanese display support in internet explorer. choose yes, and Internet Explorer will download a font that contains nearly all of the Japanese characters you would need. Mozilla and Netscape should automaticly find and use it. I belive that just downloading any true-type unicode-compatable font that contains japanese characters and installing it by dragging it into the windows font folder, will have the same effect, but I am not certain about that.

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[http://download.microsoft.com/download/OfficeXPStandard/ie_ja/1/W98NT42KMe/EN-US/ie_ja.exe Here's a link for 95/98/ME/NT. It should work for darn near any browser.] -User:Eszett

- this works for Firefox 1.5 under WinXP Pro sp2. [BWD]