Browsing the Web in Japanese at MIT

  1. .You will most likely need to try a few different settings the first time you try to view Japanese text.
  2. .There are five main encodings for Japanese text:
    1. .UTF-8
    2. .UTF-16
    3. .EUC-JP
    4. .ISO-2022-JP
    5. .Shift_JIS
  3. .You can change the encoding you are using to view a page by experimenting with the encodings menus of your browser (see below).
  4. .Some browsers have an auto-detect option - that is to say, the browser tries to guess the encoding of whatever page you are viewing.  If you can choose to auto-detect, this is probably the easiest way to correctly display any page on the web.
  5. .Internet Explorer:
    1. .Windows: you can select any supported encoding from the View -> Encoding -> More menu item.
    2. .MacOS X: View > Character Set > Your-Character-Set-Choice.
  6. .Gecko based browsers: Mozilla, Netscape 7.x & FireFox, the View -> Character Coding -> More menu item offers submenus with regions; the available encodings are listed on these submenus (earlier Mozilla or Navigator use View -> Character Set).
  7. .KHTML
    1. .Safari has the View -> Text Encoding menu item.
    2. .Konqueror uses the View -> Set Encoding -> Manual menu item.
  8. .OmniWeb
    1. .4.x: Place the character encoding pop-up in the tool bar, then Character Encoding > Region / Category / From Server > Encoding.
    2. .5.xβ: I haven't downloaded this version yet.
  9. .Opera
    1. .MacOS X, 7.5.x: View > Encoding > Encoding-Category > Encoding (has an option called "Automatic Selection," I don't use Opera much so I can't say if it is auto detect or just accept whatever the server uses).
  10. .RealPlayer 10
    1. .MacOS X, using WebKit: There is no option to change encoding, default or instance.1
1some of this text is from the musicbrainz.org MisencodingFaq

Japanese Subjects at MIT | Japanese Language Program | Foreign Languages and Literatures | MIT