Problem with Japanese characters

[Hendrik]

Hmmm, not come across this before.

Just had an order in from Japan, and the address has come out as 東山 etc. I had a look on the Protx page (it was paid for via Protx) and it appears the same there.

Is there anywhere I can go to get this deciphered? I have e-mailed the person in Japan, but not heard back from them yet.

Thanks

Hendrik
www.grand-illusions.com

[gabrielcrowe]

copy the characters very dutifully onto a package.

this will surely flummox the post office.

paste it here and i'll translate it for you. your phrase posted reads:

Higashiyama

HAH! bet you all diddnt know i could speak Japanese DID YOU!?

[Hendrik]

Problem is that they look like this -

東山田4-5-3-308

コンフォール東山田

横浜市都筑区

Not a question of reading Japanese - more coding it back into something than someone can actually read!

Hendrik
www.grand-illusions.com

[gabrielcrowe]

Higashiyama rice field 4-5-3-308
(konhuoru) Higashiyama rice field
Yokohama city Tsuzuki Ku


this dude lives in a rice field. cool.

[Hendrik]

This is weird - that is not what I typed at all! I entered all sorts of funny codes, with lots of & and # in it - and up pops proper Japanese characters!

Obviously this forum software has shown the characters correctly, whereas within Actinic (and Protx) it shows the raw code.

The first line of the address in Actinic show up as

& # 2 6 4 8 1 ; & # 2 3 6 6 5 ; & # 3 0 0 0 0 ;

(I have inserted spaces, in order to try and get it to display what I have typed)

Hendrik
www.grand-illusions.com

Either way, I now have an answer - copy and paste those Japanese characters onto the address label. great.

[Hendrik]

Or maybe just address it to the rice field. Only I think there is more than I in Japan ;-)

Hendrik

[Hendrik]

Thanks Gabriel, I appreciate your help.

Hendrik

[gabrielcrowe]

our western alphabet cant display those characters.

those are html escape codes. the forum knows this and so does your browser.

actinic has no idea.

[gabrielcrowe]

also on a side note, if anyone is interested, Actinet (plug, sorry) is capable of displaying/translating these character sets. Russian types, as well as Chinese and Japanese.

[marke]

I get the translation out to the same as Gabriel (I used to live in Tokyo). When I was there I seem to remember been told that we use 1 bit font codes where as the Japanese charecters use 2 bit font codes (whatever that means). This is why our office applications won't read their symbols.

If you include our way of writing the Japanese have 4 different sets of charecters - and they mix them when they write without leaving spaces between words! The four styles are:
Katakana
Hirigana
Kanji
Romaji

The last one, Romaji is basically what we would understand as the alphabet we use. You might want to email your customer again and specifically ask for a delivery address in Romaji rather than in the Kanji and Katakana they have used.

Hope this helps.

[leehack]

I've done a Japanese actinic site, most amusing translating it. Once you put the Japanese in, you have no idea what it says anymore.

[gabrielcrowe]

are there any japanese actinic sites? out of curiosity.

[leehack]

You need to use SHIFT-JIS encoding from the view menu in your browser to see it. This is a mix of Japanese and English as apparently this is how they like things now. http://www.stardustkids.jp/

[gabrielcrowe]

Firefox:
View > Character Encoding > More Encodings > East Asian > Japanese (Shift_JS)

[Jan]

Very impressive, all I saw was little squares and you turned it into an address.

Regards,