Japanese Characters displaying as Chinese Charactors

  • hokkaido00000

    (@hokkaido00000)


    5 years, 1 month ago

    Hello.

    I publish a mostly English website, with a little bit of content in Japanese. There are some Japanese characters (kanji) that have a similar-but-different Chinese equivalent. I would like my page to display pure Japanese, not “Chinese” characters.

    海 <– This is an example. That is the Chinese version of the character I want. If I “translate” the page in the browser, it will display as a Japanese character. But if I type in/paste the proper character into WP (looks good until I paste into WP environment)… it automatically subs in the Chinese version.

    Any suggestions to get a proper Japanese display of these characters?

    Thank you!
    [G

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    In UTF-8 encoding, kanji gets the same encoding as the equivalent Chinese. It’s the result of “Han Unification“. So you’d need to use a Japanese specific character set to get the kanji variant. That will not work well if the language is primarily English. Even if you could, while it may look correct on your computer, because of differing fonts, on other computers users may see Chinese anyway, or worse, they’ll see some placeholder glyph indicating an unsupported character.

    If you want the correct kanji variant on a UTF-8 encoded page, I think you’d have to display it as a SVG graphic image. (well, any image format will work, but SVG is the best choice for characters)

    Thread Starter hokkaido00000

    (@hokkaido00000)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    @bcworkz

    Hey… this was really helpful to me. I understand why a “unified” version would make sense (in some contexts). And I believe this might be why so many Japanese websites are “100% images” – which is generally a terrible experience, but probably serves to give them true Japanese chars.

    Very helpful. Thank you again.

    Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    Hey, I just had a thought. I wonder if there’s any sort of webfont that has mapped proper kanji glyphs to their respective Chinese encoding. If there is such a thing, you could paste in kanji, it’ll get mapped to Chinese, and if this webfont were assigned to such content via CSS, end users would see kanji and not Chinese.

    I’ve no idea if there is such a thing, but it’d be a lot better than utilizing images.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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