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Yes, I moved from France to Japan in 2001 and at the time it was almost impossible to have French accents and Japanese characters on the same OS. The web was wh
by eloisant 5y ago
Yes, I moved from France to Japan in 2001 and at the time it was almost impossible to have French accents and Japanese characters on the same OS. The web was where it was working best (because web browsers know to switch encoding for pages) but desktop apps that were still the norm were a shitshow.
Even on Linux, to have support for Japanese language you had to install a Japanese distribution (TurboLinux or RedHat Japanese version for example) and it was a real pain to get accents to work.
Worse, Japanese language had 3 encodings!! One for Windows (SJIS), one for Unix/Linux (EucJP) and ISO-2022-JP. And of course, Japan being Japan, Japanese companies were really lagging to switch to Unicode and stuck with their shitty encodings for a long time.
- necovek 5y agoEncodings are the easy part. To render stuff, you need fonts, and sometimes they are built into hardware (especially with dot-matrix printers, for instance, but even laser printers embed a couple of fonts, and likely custom Japanese fonts too), and software expects fonts with a particular encoding too. All of these were issues even for "simpler" scripts like Cyrillic (Serbian). Some of the problems with fonts remain even with Unicode (due to Han unification, different CJK regions will prefer different fonts; there might be OpenType locl-aware fonts these days, but they'd be huge).
- pezezin 5y ago> And of course, Japan being Japan, Japanese companies were really lagging to switch to Unicode and stuck with their shitty encodings for a long time. Not were, are. I'm currently living in Japan, and most of the emails I receive are encoded in Shift-JIS or ISO-2022-JP. Many websites too. Thankfully modern software is quite robust and displays everything properly, but I still get the random mojibake from time to time.