Japanese input in English Forum

[ronread]

I've search through several boards, but couldn't find anything that matches my situation.

I want to have a forum with an English-language theme and general interface but that will also allow some members to input Japanese that will be visible to all members. Most members would input English.

Any advice? Thanks!

[agridoc]

SMF allows any language input with English (or other language) as default. However some or all foreign characters will be stored as entities. See this example in my site. Read more for a non UTF-8 multilingual approach.

If there will be only a few there is no need to change. For a true multilingual use UTF-8.

[ronread]

Hi agridoc--really appreciate the super-fast response. I looked at the two pages you mentioned--I'm guessing Greek is a one-byte character set, whereas Japanese is two-bytes per character.

Let me try to do a better job of explaining my situation. When I went into the server settings and changed the language to Japanese (although I really want to keep the interface in English), the new Japanese interface looked just fine, as did the Japanese as I was inputting it into a message. Even when I clicked "Preview" things looked OK. BUT, when I posted the message and went back to read it, all I say where lines of "questionface" icons. Weird.

Basically, all I want is an English-language forum where Japanese messages can also be posted and read sometimes.

[ronread]

Well, let me try a couple Japanese HERE just for the heck of it:

大阪　神戸　京都　奈良　岡山

[ronread]

  Hot dang! It does work here, so it's obviously possible in SMF.

Now, how do I do it? Any advice appreciated!

[agridoc]

ronread the SMF site runs in UTF-8, it's the true multilingual solution.

However, as I wrote, UTF-8 in not needed if you want just a few messages in Japanese or any language. See an example of Japanese (copy paste) in my site, you can also test it as a guest in the test board.

You will see there

その機敏さに息を呑むことでしょう。過去に数え切れないスタント・タイトルを獲得してきました。そして今その誕生から半世紀を経てポールセッターとして高性能と組立ての易しさと共に復活しました。

If you look at the generated page source you will see it as

その機敏さに息を呑むことでしょう。過去に数え切れないスタント・タイトルを獲得してきました。そして今その誕生から半世紀を経てポールセッターとして高性能と組立ての易しさと共に復活しました。

In this topic's generated page source you will see it as Japanese.

Either way SMF does what you want to do. If you want just a few messages occasionaly leave it as it is, otherwise you switch to UTF-8.

You installed Japanese language, I saw that both versions of SMF Japanese language files use UTF-8 codepage, I thought Japanese usually use EUC-JP, ISO-2022-JP, windows-932 or Shift_JIS. That's why you had exclamation marks when you posted switching SMF to Japanese. If you post Japanese with the English interface they will appear correctly but will be stored as NCRs.

[ronread]

Thanks Agridoc

Well, I got things working right! Sorry it's been so long since I've replied--have been on the road for work. Actually, my explorations in SMF is volunteer work for my Macintosh club, which is finally going from FirstClass software to a web-based solution. SMF is one of the candidates we're considering. Unfortunately, I now have to concentrate on my real job!

Since this problem is vexing MANY people, from my perusal of many threads, I'm posting my 'solution' in a new thread.