[Typo3-dev] typo3 and japanese

[Kasper Skårhøj]

I just spend a few days in Paris working on Japanese localization of a
website...

What I came back with is this:

utf-8 is OK for storage of information (very good and very important).
shift-jis is preferred for display of information in the frontend (will
be possible also, although it requires conversion forth/back which is
error-prone).
Graphics generation can easily be done if you have a japanese font.

The biggest surprise to me was when they presented me with the fact that
in japanese, korean and chinese text there are no spaces between the
glyphs. So, how can the browse make a soft linebreak in the text? Well,
by just breaking in any glyph sequense you like of course. But that is a
problem, because words in these languages typically consist of a set of
these glyphs and in order to break the line softly at the right spot you
need to break *between* the glyphs that make up a word! Now, that is not
a problem if you understand japanese text of course, but a computer
doesn't and since there are no space characters between words like in
western text there is no token by which browsers can divide words...

Hmm, it was all very confusing and partly shocking to me... :-)

- kasper

-- 
TYPO3 - everything artcoded