Hi, I am starting a dating website in Japanese at http://www.BanzaiTokyo.com

The problem is that I am not Japanese myself It's not a big deal concerning the translation and site management - in fact I am building this website for my girlfriend who is a native Japanese.

We have already started translating the files and if you change the encoding in the browser manually to Japanese(Shift_JIS) you will see that most of the characters are displayed correctly, but there are still a few which are not.

If you open the language file in a text editor (say notepad) all the characters look fine.

I was wondering if there are any Japanese webmasters who could tell me what the problem it is and how I could solve it. Thanking for any information in advance!

ご連絡お待ちしています。ありがとうございます。

The obvious place to start is with character encoding. You've specified UTF-8 (das good) - just to make absolutely certain, did you specifically save your files as UTF-8 too? The character set metatag means nothing if the document isn't saved in the proper format. If you're not sure, try opening your files in notepad, and when you save them, make sure you specify UTF-8 in the Save Dialog box (at the very bottom).

ok, thanks for the hint! I will try that when I get home (as I've mentioned, we used my girlfriend's computer for editing the files - on my computer notepad doesn't read the characters correctly...

If you'd like a nice font specifically for Unicode, try Code2000 (http://www.code2000.net/code2000_page.htm). It contains roughly 60,000 of the possible ~100,000 Unicode characters. I happen to think it is a very pretty font too (you might need to activate font smoothing in your OS if the font appears choppy). I use Code2000 as my notepad default font.

The download link is near the bottom of the page. It's a 7 mb. font - nice and compact for a 60,000 glyph font!

Now you don't have to wait until you get home to test my theory :D

If you'd like a nice font specifically for Unicode, try Code2000 (http://www.code2000.net/code2000_page.htm). It contains roughly 60,000 of the possible ~100,000 Unicode characters. I happen to think it is a very pretty font too (you might need to activate font smoothing in your OS if the font appears choppy). I use Code2000 as my notepad default font.

The download link is near the bottom of the page. It's a 7 mb. font - nice and compact for a 60,000 glyph font!

Now you don't have to wait until you get home to test my theory :D

no it is not that. I don't know why, but the characters wouldn't display on my computer anyway...

Perhaps there's a setting in Windows (are you using Windows?) that enables Unicode? From what I recall, Windows on default install only has average Unicode support, and there are system tweaks to change this.

the_pm, thanks a lot for your help! The problem is solved now - saving files in UTF-8 really helped and (I am really stupid!) I completely forgot that the language by default was set to Russian and not Japanese on my PC, so changing that helped too :)