The IME Pad is part of the Microsoft Windows 2000 Japanese Input Method Editor, IME. The IME Pad is a tool that allows you to lookup kanji using stroke count, radical, or even hand writing. Click here for an example.

Currently, the English version of Macromedia Dreamweaver for the PC does not support direct Japanese input. You can input Japanese text directly in English version Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash using newer versions of MAC OS with Japanese support installed.

Here are two methods to copy Japanese text from Microsoft Office applications to Macromedia Dreamweaver. Remember that you also need to setup Dreamweaver correctly in order to display Japanese text correctly.

The Microsoft Proofing Tools software provides extra language-specific functionality for English-based Microsoft Office applications. Proofing Tools exist for many languages, and I have created a sample Microsoft Word document to demonstrate these features for Japanese. Although you can install the MultiLanguage Pack on Windows 95/98/ME systems, all of the functionality will not be available, like the Page Layout Document Grid and Vertical Text.

See the Microsoft Office Help files for more information.

Microsoft Office Help Topics

The following Microsoft Word document will not display 100% properly unless you are using Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Word 2000 on a PC, but you can still get some idea about what the Proofing Tools do. On MACs, you may have to select all of the text and change it to Osaka font.

The Microsoft Windows Input Language may be set to use a Japanese keyboard instead of the IME. Go to the Windows Control Panel, open the Regional Options dialog box, select the Input Locales tab, and check the Keyboard Layout/IME settings. If you do not have a Japanese keyboard, then you will need to use the Japanese Input System (MS-IME2000).

The Search Explorer Bar will display in Japanese if Japanese is the first language in the the Internet Explorer Language Preferences list. After changing the Language Preferences settings, you may need to click the New button in the Search Explorer Bar to reset the text. See the following images for examples

Turn off Autocorrect! In Microsoft Word or Excel, select Tools | AutoCorrect and disable Capitalize first letter of sentences. Microsoft Office looks at the first byte of the 2-byte Japanese character and capitalizes the first byte, thus destroying the Japanese character.

1. You may not have Japanese language support and fonts installed on your computer.

2. Or, you may need to manually switch the character set in your Web browser.Some Web browsers do not automatically switch character sets, and some Web pages were not designed with the Japanese encoding HTML Tag that enables automatic switching.

3. The font settings of your browser may not be setup to use Japanese fonts for Japanese encoded Web pages.

In addition to the operating system (MAC OS or Windows) Japanese language support, you also need to install the Adobe Acrobat Japanese fonts. The links are listed below. Note that not all computers on the CSUMB campus will let you install software.

Adobe Acrobat 4 Japanese Fonts for Microsoft Windows (5.6MB) (ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader/win/4.x/jpnfont.exe)
After downloading this file, you will need to run the installation program.

Adobe Acrobat 4 Japanese Fonts for MAC (5.0MB) (ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader/mac/4.x/jpnfont.sit.bin)
After downloading this file, you will need to run the installation program.

With Japanese support installed, you will see a language icon, either an American flag or blue diamond in the upper right of the screen on MACs or a blue En in the lower right of the screen in Microsoft Windows. In Microsoft Word, both MAC and PC, click the language icon. Japanese input gives you three input modes, hiragana, katakana, and roomaji. The basic sequence for typing is to type a word, press the space bar for kanji list, then press enter to accept.On PCs, You may be able to press the LEFT ALT+SHIFT keys to cycle through the different IME languages.

For MACs, the input applet is called Kotoeri

For PCs, the input applet is called Global Input Method Editor, IME.

As of Fall 2000, the best way to send and receive Japanese email is to send a Microsoft Word attachment. If you receive a Microsoft Word document attachment created on a Japanese computer with a Japanese filename, then make sure you save the file with an English filename. English operating systems do not recognize Japanese characters in the filename, except Windows 2000 with Japanese support installed.

Other Options:
You can use Microsoft Outlook Express, assuming both sender and recipient have Outlook Express.
You can use a Web based email service, like HotMail.

See the Japanese encoding glossary

Microsoft Office 2000 has the option during installation to install the Arial Unicode Font. This is a 23MB Unicode 2.1 font, with approximately 40,000 characters.

From Microsoft Word 2000 Help:
Fonts provided with Office 2000
Many of the TrueType fonts provided with Office support a wide variety of languages that use different writing systems, such as Greek or Russian, rather than just the languages of Western Europe; a few fonts for Asian languages are provided as well. The font Arial Unicode MS provided with Office is a full Unicode font, containing all of the approximately 40,000 alphabetical characters, ideographic characters, and symbols defined in the Unicode 2.1 standard. Because of its considerable size and the typographic compromises required to make such a font, Arial Unicode MS should be used only when you can't use multiple fonts tuned for different writing systems. For example, if you have multilingual data in Microsoft Access from many different writing systems, you can use Arial Unicode MS as the font to display the data tables with, because these can't accept many different fonts. If you didn't install the Arial Unicode MS font when you installed Office 2000 or your Office program, just reinstall Office and choose Add or Remove Features. Click the plus sign (+) next to Office Tools, click the plus sign next to International Support, click the icon next to Universal Font, and then choose the installation option you want. Reinstall Office.

First, make sure you include the proper encoding HTML Tag in the Head section of your Web page.
See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/charset.html

For example:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=Shift_JIS">
</head>
<body>
???
</body>
</html>

Currently, many English Web editors do not handle Japanese text input very well. Dreamweaver 3 with MAC OS 9 is the best solution. Here is a list of programs to try, but email me if you have success using other programs.
MAC OS: Dreamweaver 3, Microsoft Word, Netscape Composer, SimpleText
Windows 2000: Microsoft Word 2000, Netscape Composer, Notepad
Windows NT: Microsoft Word 2000, Netscape Composer
Windows 95/98: Netscape Composer? (not tested)

Notes: Microsoft Windows 2000 with Micorsoft Word 2000 will not convert vertical text to HTML. Your vertical text will be converted to horizontal text.

The only success that I have had directly typing Japanese text is when I use MAC OS 9 and Dreamweaver 3. First select Edit | Preferences from the top-line menu. Then make sure that Japanese fonts are selected for Japanese language; they default to English fonts. Next, edit the page properties and select the desired Japanese encoding for your page. This setup also applies to the PC and will at least allow you to see Japanese text in Dreamweaver on the PC. Click here for details. I would be glad to hear about other system configurations that work for Japanese Web page design.

Macromedia Flash and Adobe Photoshop will also allow Japanese input on MAC OS9, just make sure you switch your font to a Japanese font, like Osaka.

Sometimes this does not work, and here is a stupid computer trick you can try on a MAC.

1. Copy the Japanese text in the Web browser.
2. Paste the text into a blank SimpleText text file and select all of the text.
3. Now, if the font is Osaka-??,, try changing it to plain Osaka.
4. Now, recopy all of the text and paste it into Microsoft Word.

The two basic Japanese fonts that are installed with Microsoft Office software are MSothic and MSMincho. The following image also lists other Asian fonts.

Asian font sample. (GIF 30KB)