[Aviah Morag]

It's about time I get this right...

I have an e-mail in my Inbox from a Japanese friend. The text appears with encoding problems of the typical "&^%*�����ߺ�Ř��" variety. How can I make this appear correctly? Here is an excerpt:

��KǡǃǢNjǷ�Bdžǻǽǁ�������[�����ǃǭ��ǽDZǐ��ǧ��ǵǭ�vǢNjǷ�BLJ�

This is a big problem with Mac and Windows users working together. I am using Mail in English, and changing the fonts doesn't seem to do anything.

Aviah

I'm in sys 9, but if I copy your stuff, paste it in simpletext, and choose Osaka font, I get a nice looking combo of kana and kanji. You could try this with TextEdit. Now whether it means something I can't tell you...

[Aviah Morag]

Even this does not work in OS X. When I display the text in Osaka in either TextEdit or AppleWorks, the same garbage characters appear. It seems that somehow, I need to make the OS know that the text should be displayed in the Japanese script. Any idea how to do this? This is a real pain, I do a lot of international work.

Aviah

[claudej]

I get almost every day mail from Japanese friends. And they are on PCs, and I'm on a Mac.

No problems.

Two questions :

1. Are you using OSX or OS9 and previous ?
2. Which software are you using to read your e-mail ?


------------------

[claudej]

f mZ

Aviah is right, his stuff seems to be garbage, unless I read it in classic mode on Netscape and use simpletext.

Claude's stuff comes through perfectly on OmniWeb, and I can cut and paste it into Mail.

Something is messed up in the way OS X, or Mail, handles Japanese encodings perhaps. [email protected]

[iguana]

A couple of suggestions:

Check the message headers for encoding information. Common methods include:

iso-2202-jp Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
iso-2202-jp
UTF-8 (Unicode)

Without this information, Mail has no way of knowing how the message was encoded. You may find that the sender's mail client is the cause. I'm sure most current clients are intelligent enough to automatically add this information. Could the sender be using some archaic old mail client? Incidentally, I have had no problems with any of the above encodings in Mail, using it in English.

Another possible cause could be your mail server. While I'm not completely sure of this, note the first encoding method I listed appends 7bit encoding. (Apparently) some servers only support 7-bit (per byte) text. Japanese text encoding (such as JIS and its bastard son, Shift-JIS) uses a double byte method. Each byte though is 8 bits, not 7. So when your server receives double-byte mail, it strips all the bytes of a bit, unknowingly and irretrievably mincing the sender's message.

The only way around this is to either get the sender to specify 7-bit encoding in their mail client. (From experience, Outlook Express for Windows 5.5 does this automatically) Or switch to a new mail server.

Good Luck

[rw]

I think that iguana's first proposal is probably right: your friend's email app is not identifying its encoding as Japanese. I get Japanese email fairly often without problem, but from one particular sender I just get "mojiboke" (garbled characters). I don't think the problem is with Mac and Windows communicating; I think it's the sender's email app not announcing that its text is Japanese. (Unfortunately, I was not able to figure out a way to convert the mojiboke email to Japanese characters.)

[rw]

I think that iguana's first proposal is probably right: your friend's email app is not identifying its encoding as Japanese. I get Japanese email fairly often without problem, but from one particular sender I just get "mojiboke" (garbled characters). I don't think the problem is with Mac and Windows communicating; I think it's the sender's email app not announcing that its text is Japanese. (Unfortunately, I was not able to figure out a way to convert the mojiboke email to Japanese characters.)

[Aviah Morag]

I was able to find a simple workaround that solves everything: log in to OS X in Japanese. That made everything display correctly. What I still can't seem to do it get the text to display correctly when using OS X in English. So there's a solution, but it's a pain - should text display be unaffected by the language of the OS itself?

Aviah

If the text can be read in Classic and in OS X with the system language set to Japanese, but not in X set to English, it seems like a bug in OS X rather than a sender problem.

I notice Claude's Japanese text, which reads fine in Omniweb, is blank for me in Netscape, regardless of encoding chosen.