Help:Installing Japanese character sets

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This help page will help you install Japanese character sets so that your computer will display them properly on the internet in your web browser as all modern operating systems and web browsers support Japanese fonts. Throughout Wikipedia, Japanese characters are used in many different articles. Many computers with English or other Western operating systems do not show them by default, but most require a minimal amount of work to install or activate the capability.

Contents

Note

If you came here by clicking a small ? near some Japanese characters (called kanji or kana), here is an explanation of how the Japanese is formatted with the English and romanization. When Japanese is included in an article on Wikipedia, it is almost always placed within a template which helps to standardize the appearance of the Japanese characters, as well as the translation and romanization of those characters. If you look at the code of the page (by clicking on the Edit tab at the top of the page or on the Edit link for that particular section, you will see something like what appears on the Code line in the following table:

Code {{Nihongo|English|Kanji|Rōmaji|extra|extra2}}
Gives English (Kanji Rōmaji?, extra) extra2

This template marks the Kanji segment as being in Japanese Kanji, which helps web browsers and other user agents to display it correctly. The template uses the following parameters

  • English. Optional. The word as translated into English. Note that this will sometimes be the actual Japanese word due to it being adopted into English.
  • Kanji. Required. The word in Japanese kanji and/or kana, the logographic writing system.
  • Romaji. Optional. The word in Japanese Romaji, the Romanized syllabic writing system used for foreign words. Also known as a "transliteration".
  • extra. Optional. Can also be expressed as a named parameter, extra=
  • extra2. Optional. Can also be expressed as a named parameter, extra2=. It is only useful in ";" definitions (extra2 will be displayed without bold, whereas text following the template will get the bold).

Examples

Regular use:

Code {{Nihongo|English|英語|eigo}}
Gives English (英語 eigo?)

Without English:

Code {{Nihongo||英語|eigo}}
Gives eigo (英語?)

With extra2:

Code

; {{Nihongo||虚無僧|komusō|extra2="Priest of nothingness"}}
: Mendicant priest of the Fuke sect of Zen Buddhism.
Gives
komusō (虚無僧?) "Priest of nothingness"
Mendicant priest of the Fuke sect of Zen Buddhism.

Without extra2:

Code

; {{Nihongo||虚無僧|komusō}} "Priest of nothingness"
: Mendicant priest of the Fuke sect of Zen Buddhism.
Gives
komusō (虚無僧?) "Priest of nothingness"
Mendicant priest of the Fuke sect of Zen Buddhism.

If you have questions regarding Japanese characters or the use of this template, please post your question on the talk page of WikiProject Japan.

Specific operating systems

Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu

Installing the ttf-kochi-mincho package will add support for displaying Japanese text in the Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu distribution. You can do this with the following command:

apt-get install ttf-kochi-mincho

More fonts can be installed with this command:

apt-get install ttf-kochi-mincho ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-mikachan ttf-sazanami-gothic ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-vlgothic

Fedora

Install the appropriate ttfonts packages.

For Fedora Core 3, the packages are ttfonts-zh_TW (traditional Chinese), ttfonts-zh_CN (simplified Chinese), ttfonts-ja (Japanese) and ttfonts-ko (Korean). For example,

yum install ttfonts-ja

As of Fedora Core 4, you need fonts-chinese, fonts-japanese and/or fonts-korean.

FreeBSD

With X.Org 7.x and above, install the package x11-fonts/font-jis-misc:

pkg_add -r font-jis-misc-1.0.0.tbz

Please note that the package version may be different. Alternatively, this can be easily accomplished by installing from the ports tree:

cd /usr/ports/x11-fonts/font-jis-misc && make install clean

Gentoo GNU/Linux

Install a Japanese font package, for example one of these:

emerge media-fonts/sazanami
emerge media-fonts/mikachan-font-otf

Mac OS X

By default, all necessary fonts and software are installed in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar (2002) and higher.

For Mac OS X 10.1 multilingual software updates are available as free downloads from Apple's website. The Asian Language Update will install support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Mac OS X Language Support Updates at apple.com

Mandriva Linux 2007

Install one or several Japanese font packages. The most common is fonts-ttf-japanese, but in addition you can also install fonts-ttf-japanese-extra, fonts-ttf-japanese-ipamona and fonts-ttf-japanese-mplus_ipagothic.

Make sure you have UTF-8 fonts enabled, as they may not be if you have upgraded from a former version of Mandrake/Mandriva.

openSUSE

If you install it from DVD, you don’t need to install anything.

Unicode Japanese fonts

Windows

95, 98, ME and NT

Your system should offer to download Asian fonts by default while viewing pages in those languages, just as long as you're using Internet Explorer. [1]

Otherwise, update your system manually with the language support packs.

2000

Instructions for Windows 2000

XP and Server 2003

A Windows CD-ROM is needed while installing support for East Asian languages, even if it's not the one used during installation. (Non-East Asian localizations only, as those from East Asia install Japanese support natively.)

Instructions for Windows XP and Server 2003

Alternatively, you can download the Japanese language pack by itself from Microsoft. No disc is needed for this option.

Vista and Windows 7

Both Vista and Windows 7 include native OS support for displaying Japanese text by default. In order to input Japanese on a non-Japanese version of the OS, however, the Japanese input method editor must be enabled from the Region and Language (Windows 7) or Regional and Language Options (Vista) section of the Control Panel.

See also

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Installing_Japanese_character_sets"