Japanese in English Mac Applications?
by The EditorsQ: I work with programs like PageMaker and Photoshop on my Mac a lot, and I need to be able to prepare bilingual background material. While the Japanese versions of most software handle English just fine, my impression is that there are few options for those of us who normally use the English versions but want to incorporate some Japanese.
Using both versions, besides being expensive, is not always the best solution. For example, I use both English and Japanese MS-Word on my PowerMac, with Japanese Language Kit, but I find that having both on the same hard disk causes some problems, such as insertion of corrupt and illegible fonts into the menu of available fonts on the English version. I also have KanjiTalk, but I wonder whether loading it will alleviate or increase such problems. Could you please give me some advice?
A: You're correct that, while the double-byte Japanese versions of most software can accept both Japanese and English input, single-byte English versions rarely allow users to incorporate Japanese into their documents. So installing KanjiTalk will not help you put kanji into your English applications. At Computing Japan, the art director runs our PowerMac on English Mac OS with Japanese Language Kit (JLK), and uses the Japanese versions of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and QuarkXpress.
The only thing that JLK seems to do when it registers English software is allow the Japanese text in menus and title bars to display properly (provided you select a Japanese font like Osaka in the "Views" Control Panel). It does not register Extensions and Control Panels, hence the garbage-character font names you've described. If you register English Adobe Illustrator with JLK, you can probably get away with inputting some Japanese, but the characters will not always display properly. Further, you won't be able to edit anything you've input except by deleting the whole thing and retyping it. An awkward workaround is to get the text to appear exactly as you want it using a Japanese word processing program, and then paste it into your Illustrator file selecting a Japanese font. Funny characters can still crop up, though, so this isn't a real solution.
In English Adobe Photoshop, even when you select the correct font, it is almost impossible to get it to display properly. When we checked with Adobe Systems Japan about inputting Japanese in documents created by the English versions of Adobe software, a spokesman confirmed that the user will encounter difficulties. At present, however, Adobe has no plans for making its English applications Japanese-capable because there is not enough demand. Your only choice for full, trouble-free Japanese editing and input is to use Japanese-version software.
As you are aware, there can be confusion when running both the English and Japanese versions of the same software on one computer. In the case of Microsoft Word, both the English and Japanese files look like they came from the same creator application to the Mac. Your computer will tend to launch the same version of the application as the language of your OS, so when you double-click on a Japanese Word document, it may launch English Word if you are running on English OS. You need to remember to launch the proper version of the application and then open the file you want, or drag the file onto the proper application to open it.
The garbage-character font names (for the Japanese fonts) that display in the English version of MS-Word are annoying, but this does not seem to affect the performance of the software. The real problem comes if you open up an English Word document using Japanese Word and then save it under Japanese Word. If you do so, you'll find a very odd-looking document when you next try to open it up under English Word (with karats and/or spaces between each letter of your text).
In a bilingual system, a good alternative is to use a different application for Japanese word processing, such as EGWord Pure 1.2 (ErgoSoft, 03-5467-8871; retail price JPY 12,800). This is a simple, easy-to-use Japanese text editor that offers all the basic formatting commands. Although 8MB of RAM is needed, it runs on about 1.2MB of RAM and takes up about 1.3MB of hard disk on PowerMacs. Or for a full-featured, page layout-like application, try EGWord 7.0. With MS-Word E and EGWord, you can switch back and forth between your English and Japanese documents without worrying about accidentally saving your document in the wrong version software.
| If you need to insert only a bit of Japanese, say a small headline, into an English document, try this sneaky workaround. Create the kanji in a Japanese word processing program, set the font size really big, and take a snapshot of it (command + shift + 3). Then open the screenshot with Photoshop, crop it, size it, and import it as an image into PageMaker, Word, or whatever English application you're using. The sharpness is only about 72 dpi, so you can't make it bigger or use it for small fonts, but this method works in many cases. |
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