These pages contain information for Mac users who want to browse the web in Japanese and maybe add some Japanese to their own web pages. (Some of the features described require you to enable Japanese input on your computer; visit the first page of this site first to find out how.) The full site contents is as follows:
Under Mac OS X, browsing Japanese web pages typically does not require any special measures: usually you can just point your browser at a Japanese web page. (If you want to enter Japanese text, to do a web search for example, you need to enable Japanese input as described on the first page of this site.) What is described below is mostly details and extras-- differences between browsers, Japanese-related plug-ins and extras, troubleshooting, etc.
If you know how to write HTML and you want to write your own web pages in Japanese, see the separate page on Tips for Authoring Japanese Web Pages.
You can view web pages in Japanese with almost any recent Macintosh web browser. Which you use is largely a matter of taste. Most also have a localized Japanese version of the browser intended for use in Japan, with menus and dialogs in Japanese. But in general, you don't need these just to view Japanese pages; the English versions of these browsers can display Japanese too.
All of the following browsers can display Japanese and other Asian languages. (I have not included discontinued browsers like Netscape or IE for Mac.)
For help understanding web pages in Japanese, there are a number of ways to generate word lists or pop-up translation cues for Japanese text or Japanese pages.
will let you paste a URL or Japanese text into a dictionary window and then generate a word list for the site. Some of these sites offer translations from English into Japanese or Japanese into other languages, and all have instructions in English.In order to display a Japanese page correctly, the browser needs to realize that it is a Japanese page and figure out which of several possible encodings are used to represent the Japanese characters. If your system is Japanese enabled and your browser supports Japanese, you should be able to read the sentence below:
日本では、いわゆるポストモダンという時代は、１８世紀にもう既に終わりました。
However, if the browser is confused, it will not display the Japanese correctly, and instead of Japanese characters you will get a series of nonsense marks like this:
ìñÇÇÕÅAÇÇÇÇÈÉ|ÉXÉgÉÇÉÉìÇÇ¢ÇéûëÇÇPÇWê¢ãIÇÇÕÅAÇÇäÇèIÇÇËÇǵÇÅ
Whenever page does not display correctly, tell the browser the page is in Japanese by selecting a Japanese encoding, using the following steps. Instructions are given for the Safari and Firefox browsers, but the process is similar with other browsers. You may have to do this periodically when you come to a new Japanese page.
Pull down the "View" menu and select the following menus in sequence: Character Encoding, then Auto-Detect, and then Japanese (or Universal).
If that doesn't work, you might want to try selecting one of the other Japanese or unicode encodings, like Shift-JIS, EUC, or UTF-8 from Character Encoding > More Encodings > East Asian (or Unicode) . You can keep the encodings you need most often on a more easily accessible submenu. Add things to this menu with the "Customize List..." item. Note that Japanese pages may be encoded either with the encodings labeled as Japanese or with unicode; if you are curious about the difference, see the encodings page on this site.
The screen shown is Firefox 1.0, but the Encoding menu looks the same in Firefox 2.
Pull down the "View" menu and move down to Text Encoding, then select different Japanese options until the page displays correctly. When you go on to a new (non-Japanese) page, you should set the encoding back to "Default" manually.
The screen shown is Safari 1.3, but the encoding submenu looks the same in versions 2 and 3.
You may have to repeat this every time you come to a Japanese page, or you can set Japanese as the default encoding. If this does not work, confirm that Japanese fonts are set correctly. Setting the default encoding and fonts is described below.
Japanese on the web is represented in several different formats or encodings. A given Japanese page might be in any one of these. (For more on what exactly an encoding is, see the page on Japanese encodings deeper in this site.) The browser needs to know the specific encoding to display the Japanese correctly. It gets this information from a couple different sources: 1) from the server, in the http header that the server sends with a web page; 2) From the page itself, if the page author includes a statement about what encoding was used. If neither of these clues is present, the browser may try to guess the encoding (that's what Firefox's "auto-detect is doing") or use a default encoding. If all this fails to display the page correctly, the user has to specify the encoding from the menus above.
Firefox's encodings menus can be a bit confusing. Notice that auto-detect-Japanese and Japanese (ISO-2022-JP) are both checked in the View menu pictured above. From what I can tell, this shows that the auto-detect feature is enabled, and that the browser is displaying the current page in ISO-2022-JP. Firefox always shows what encoding the page is being displayed in, which might be helpful in some circumstances. Note that other auto-detect options are available to give the browser a hint, and you can also turn auto-detect off. With auto-detect off, apparently Firefox displays pages with uncertain encodings in the default encoding, set as described above. If you override everything and select an encoding yourself, firefox returns to detecting the encoding itself when you reload the page or go to a new page.
Safari has fewer settings and options you can change, and it does not seem to have an auto-detect function to guess encoding in cases where the page and server do not specify it. If you select an encoding of your own as described above, Safari will stick with that encoding when you go to future pages, until you select "default" again from the menu. Your override is persistent, unlike in Firefox where it only lasts for the current page. This is likely to cause problems; it seems like a poor design choice. It was still not fixed as of Safari vers. 3.03.
The measures described above should be enough most of the time. If you are still having trouble displaying Japanese pages, you might want to change some of the browser's preferences. To Access these preferences in Safari 3, choose Preferences and then "Appearance" to get the first pane below. To access these in Firefox 2, choose Preferences from the Firefox menu, then select the "Content" pane, look under "Fonts" and click on the "Advanced" button to get to the second preferences pane below. (The same preferences are available in earlier versions of Firefox and Safari, but they are in slightly different places.)
If you find you are having to tell the browser the encoding often when you view a Japanese page, you can set the default encoding to a Japanese encoding like shift_jis. The default encoding is a kind of last resort, used when the browser cannot determine the page encoding from other information. Choosing a Japanese encoding for English pages might make them display with little quirks, so choose an encoding that makes the majority of pages you view look right.
If you are still having trouble displaying Japanese pages (if none of the encoding choices result in readable Japanese on several different pages), it is possible that the browser does not know what fonts to display Japanese-encoded pages in. (An encoding is not the same as a font; for more on the difference, see the Japanese encodings page on this site.) The fonts only have to be set once, and usually they are already set correctly in the browser; some browsers like Safari don't let you access or alter the settings at all. In Firefox, select Japanese from the top pop-up menu, as shown, and make sure Japanese fonts are selected for all the options. You can also use this to select prettier Japanese fonts to make Japanese display more nicely.
If you need more specific instructions for setting encoding, default encoding, or fonts for browsers I don't treat here, the Browsers section of Alan Wood's Unicode Resources has instructions for setting the fonts in a wide range of Mac and other browsers, including older ones.
If you want to write Japanese web pages, I have another page with tips for adding Japanese to your own web pages.
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