applet jap strokes

Hi Alistair,

sounds like a topic close to my heart! :D

If you're planning to display Japanese characters, the one problem you will have is the font.

You'll have to do one of the following :

1) Rely on the user having a certain font installed on their system. The default Windows Hiragana font (which I believe is the stupidly named "MS Gothic") is probably a good one to try for. Then create it by name (e.g. Font japFont = new Font("MS Gothic", Font.PLAIN, 12); ).

2) If you've got a secure certificate on your applet, you can grant the applet file writing permission. After this, you can load a Japanese TrueType font if you're using a fairly recent Java Plugin by calling Font.createFont(). Be aware that this has known bugs in it in JDK1.3. You need the file write permission to allow it to create a temp file, and in 1.3 and backwards, this temp file doesn't get deleted at the end of program execution like it should (a pain if it's a large font).

If the thought of file permissions and secure certificates frightens the hell out of you, then definately use number 1! :)

So is the applet going to display stroke order and so forth for the Hiragana characters? Sounds excellent! Good luck!

Hope that helps!

Martin Hughes

martinhughes at 2007-7-1 20:11:12 >

The project I'm on nowadays has very little to do with it, but I've worked on one previously where we had to internationalise an entire application to use both Chinese and Japanese.

The application was a scheduling program used by mining companies, and it weighed in at a pretty hefty size. The Chinese and Japanese resource bundles the thing was using were a sight to behold!

But the main problem we ran into was the fonts needed to display the languages. Everything else was pretty much downhill once we got the font problems out of the way.

That, plus the small fact that I studied Japanese for ten years. ;)

Let's just say that I saw the bit about stroke orders in the Japanese characters and had flashbacks! :D

Hope that helps!

Martin Hughes

martinhughes at 2007-7-1 20:11:12 >