Hi all, I'm a bit of a newbee and tried searching for an answer in these forums, but couldnt find one. On the Reading page, there's a link to http://www.geocities.co.jp/HeartLand-Gaien/7211/ which has a lot of old Japanese stories to practice on. Only problem is that in Firefox on my system it displays like this: ????????????, while in IE7 it looks fine: 昔、昔、山を越え、峠を越え. Other sites (like koohii.com) look fine in Firefox. Of course I like to use firefox plugins like perapera-kun which don't work in IE...

Any tips?

Regards,
Eltjo - エルチョ

Maybe you need to change the encoding? In Firefox, go to View -> Character Encodings -> More Encodings -> East Asian -> Pick one of the Japanese ones until it works.

Thanks, I got it to work now! I had tried all kinds of stuff under Tools|Options, but never thought to look under the View menu... I set the Character encoding autodetect to Japanese, and everything displays fine now!

Yes, it is unfortunate but for some reason many people who make websites forget to add proper information in the "code" to tell the browser what encoding to use. This is very common for many Japanese sites where one expects to see Shift-JIS but the site is for some reason encoded in EUC-JP etc. Very annoying.

There is another problem. Some pages won't include the language information. So you might render these pages with chinese fonts by accident.