I'm running Windows 7, and I have no trouble typing Japanese or reading it under most circumstances.

However, whenever I get ahold of a plain text file that contains Japanese (usually packed in a zip file with some japanese app I downloaded), it only shows me garbled text! What's wrong here?

Zarxrax Wrote:I'm running Windows 7, and I have no trouble typing Japanese or reading it under most circumstances.

However, whenever I get ahold of a plain text file that contains Japanese (usually packed in a zip file with some japanese app I downloaded), it only shows me garbled text! What's wrong here?

That happens to me a lot as well. I think it has something to do with windows' love of ANSI. Try opening it with different programs. The one that seems to work best for me is Editpad. Sometimes they will open with the W7 メモ帳 or ワードパッド. Then you can save it to ANSI.

Wrong encoding, presumably. There are a number of possible ways to encode Japanese text, including at least: EUC-JP [traditional Unix choice], shift-JIS [traditional Windows choice], ISO-2022-JP [traditional choice in email/news], and UTF-8 [single encoding that can handle multiple languages; sanest choice in the modern world].

If whatever app you're using doesn't guess the encoding or let you specify it, you need to find a conversion utility, I guess. (Try pointing a web browser at the text file and then play about with the encoding settings; on Firefox they're in View->Character encoding->...)