Windows XP, support for east-asian languages

[His Divine Shadow]

I installed support for east-asian languages and I can see the funky asian characters but I cannot find any in my font folder nor type them in corel draw, I was hoping I could write something in western and just change the font to something asian.

What must I do to be able to type asian characters?

[Pick]

Well, my computer's set up for Asian languages...

I I recall, when I put Japanese on my computer, I had to set up the langauge bar for my user account as well as merely have it supported. Have you gotten that far?

If not:

Control Panel -> Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options -> Regional and Language Options -> Languages (tab) -> "Details" (button)

And then... "Add" to add whatever language you need if it's not already there (good time to select a keyboard setup) and then "Preferences -> Language Bar" From there you can choose to show the language bar. With that bar, should you make it visible, switching between languages you put in with Add for your user account is a breeze!

Sorry if I'm missing part of your request and just severely patronized you.

[His Divine Shadow]

I don't want to turn the whole computer into asian, I just want to be able to use asian characters in my programs.

[Ypoknons]

For Chinese you can use Richwin or NJStar, I suppose. That works for Japanese too. You have to know pinyin for this.

[phongn]

I installed support for east-asian languages and I can see the funky asian characters but I cannot find any in my font folder nor type them in corel draw, I was hoping I could write something in western and just change the font to something asian.

That wouldn't work. The Asian fonts need to have the Western characters as well for various purposes, so simply changing them generally doesn't work. In addition, many Asian characters are two-byte ones, as opposed to the single-byte Western characters.

What must I do to be able to type asian characters?

Use the character map.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Microsoft Global IME. Just look for (search "IME") and download it off their site. It's free.

[Datana]

Just use the built-in IME in XP. Enable it with Control Panel - Regional and Language Options, then "Details" under "Text services and input languages." You can add a variety of input schemes for foreign languages, and then subsequently switch between them with either a keyboard shortcut or a new icon in the Start bar. Naturally, you can only add IMEs for languages you've installed support for.

[His Divine Shadow]

I just tried did that actually but I think it is unreliable.

For example with cyrllic, I manually translated my name letter per letter and it was very close to what a western to cyrillic program got that I found.

using the language file:
Вуттшы

Using the converter,and getting the proper russian(I think):
Деннис

Hell when I enter the text I think is incorrect and convert it back to western I get "vuttshy", which is not my name(Dennis), when I translate the other it is the same as what I converted from, so I don't know, if it's wrong with russian, why would it be right with any other language?

Wхат ис вуттшы аныwаы И wондер, анёне кноw? Ох анд ёу цан доwнлоад тхе програм хере.

[Datana]

Russian keyboard layout is likely nothing like a typical Western layout. The buttons are probably sorted using a scheme where there's no direct correlation to what's written on your keyboard. A quick search revealed this page, which shows at least one such layout.

[His Divine Shadow]

Russian keyboard layout is likely nothing like a typical Western layout. The buttons are probably sorted using a scheme where there's no direct correlation to what's written on your keyboard. A quick search revealed this page, which shows at least one such layout.

Ah it seems you are correct, if I follow that one then ВУТТШЫ does properly correspond to each button. But the phonetic sounds.. they do not correspond, using the wikipedia for this.

В = v
У = oo
Т = t
Т = t
Ш = sh
Ы = i

voottshi, almost like "vuttshy" which is what the 3rd gen program translated it into, so I am typing nonsense.

Lets look at Деннис

Д =d
е = ye
н = n
н = n
и = ee
с = s

Phoentically it becomes my proper name, although distorted like someone with a bad accent would have spoken it.

[Datana]

Ah it seems you are correct, if I follow that one then ВУТТШЫ does properly correspond to each button. But the phonetic sounds.. they do not correspond, using the wikipedia for this.

That's because the phonetic sounds have nothing to do with the keyboard layout, which is usually laid out for efficiency of typing rather than matching 1-for-1 the English one. As I said, you should ignore the English printed on the keyboard and go with what you know of Russian. I had a similar hangup when trying to type in Thai -- I kept reaching for the equivalent English sound, except that the Thai keyboard layout has absolutely nothing to do with the English one.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

My computer does most Asian fonts just fine and I can type them in, but where can I find supplementary code conversion pages to download? I'm missing one for EUC-JP, so a small minority of Japanese games downloaded don't show the text correctly.

I tried Google and didn't have much luck.