Found it!

[pne]

*Phew*

Now that I read linguaphiles regularly, it didn't take me long before I noticed one program I had forgotten to install on the new hard drive -- NJ Communicator! To enable me to read and write Chinese, Japanese, and Korean even in applications which normally don't support that.

Reading wasn't so important since Opera can display CJK (and I don't read much Usenet these days otherwise it comes in handy for sci.lang.japan and occasionally in sci.lang), but I wanted it for the input methods.

I had downloaded Microsoft's Global IMEs for all four CJK locales but that only works in MSIE. But now I can install NJ Communicator and input also in Opera.

Comments

[timwi.livejournal.com]

What Windows are you using? On Windows 2000, I'm not having any problems inputting CJK (using standard Windows IMEs) into Opera.

[pne.livejournal.com]

What Windows are you using?

Windows 98SE ... next to no built-in Unicode support (like all Win9x), so it's not surprising that the "global" IMEs only work in MS applications.

I think the global IMEs I downloaded only work inside MSIE text boxes and MS Outlook (also Express?) HTML emails.

And on Windows NT, which we have at work, I can't use the global IME in Opera, either. It's simply not an option in the keyboard switcher unless I'm in an MSIE textbox or Outlook.

[n-true.livejournal.com]

I'm using Windows XP... do you think with this NJ Communicator I'll be able to read garbled and supposedly Japanese/Chinese/Korean messages in applications which don't usually support this, even in XP? Do you know WinMX? I can't input or see CJK characters there, instead it is displayed as ‚ !!ƒSƒƒ“‚È‚³‚¢!!‚à‚µ‚©‚µ‚ÄŠO‘‚Ì•û‚Å‚·‚©H, for example. Would this NJ thingy help?

[pne.livejournal.com]

do you think with this NJ Communicator I'll be able to read garbled and supposedly Japanese/Chinese/Korean messages in applications which don't usually support this, even in XP?

No idea whether it works under XP. I imagine so, since it works under NT and 98.

Do you know WinMX?

Nope. What is it?

I can't input or see CJK characters there, instead it is displayed as ‚ !!ƒSƒƒ“‚È‚³‚¢!!‚à‚µ‚©‚µ‚ÄŠO‘‚Ì•û‚Å‚·‚©H, for example. Would this NJ thingy help?

Quite likely -- though you may have to try out a couple of charsets if you don't know what charset the data is in.

If you only want to see the data, then you can use NJWin; you only need NJ Communicator if you also need input.

Note that both programs are shareware -- $49 for NJWin CJK Viewer and $99 for NJStar Communicator. (30-day trial version are available which generate nag screens afterwards.)

Note that there's a notice to WinXP users on their page. Go to http://www.njstar.com.au/ and click on "NJ Communicator" and "NJWIN Viewer" on the top right. (The notice is slightly different for both.)

Re:

[n-true.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks. Well, WinMX is a peer-to-peer program where you can download mp3s and other files from other users... quite much like KaZaA, Morpheus, eDonkey, eMule and the former Napster.

Hmm... maybe it even works for Trillian? :3
Oh, and does it maybe support UTF-8 as well, so I could as well write and read Cyrillic and Greek? That would be neat. :]

[pne.livejournal.com]

Well... kind of. It is rather wedded to the CJK languages.

It supports UTF-8, but you have to choose between "Chinese UTF Simplified", "Chinese UTF Traditional", "Japanese UTF-8 UTF-7", and "Korean UTF-8 UTF-7". And then it will only display characters in its internal font for that charset, I believe.

There are Greek and Cyrillic letters in most CJK charsets, so you'll see something... but it won't be terribly pretty. For one, the Cyrillic/Greek letters are doublewidth (the width of a hanzi, not the width of a normal letter) and there aren't any accented Greek letters nor final-s.

And there's no easy way to enter those characters without clicking on an on-screen table. But when you do that, you apparently get normal characters in a Unicode-aware system -- here's what I just produced that way (in this case, with the Chinese IME and "Symbols Input"): водка, Σοφοκλησ.

Try it and see.