Help:Installing Japanese character sets

This help page will help you install Japanese character fonts so that your computer will display Japanese characters properly on the Internet in your web browser. All modern operating systems and web browsers support Japanese characters, and they are used in many different articles throughout Wikipedia. Many computers with English or other Western operating systems do not show Japanese characters by default, but most require only a minimal amount of work to install or activate the capability.

If you came here by clicking the ? near some Japanese characters, and are interested in how Japanese is displayed on Wikipedia, see the Note at the end of this page.

Windows Vista, 7, and 8
Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 include native OS support for displaying Japanese text by default. To input Japanese on a non-Japanese version of the OS, however, the Japanese input method editor must be enabled from the Region and Language (Windows 7 and 8) or Regional and Language Options (Vista) section of the Control Panel.

XP and Server 2003
A Windows CD-ROM is needed to install support for East Asian languages, even if it's not the one used to install Windows on your computer. (Non-East Asian versions of Windows only, as those from East Asia install Japanese support natively.)

95, 98, ME and NT
Your system should offer to download Asian fonts by default while viewing pages in those languages, provided that you are using Internet Explorer. 

Otherwise, update your system manually with the language support packs.

Mac OS X
By default, all necessary fonts and software are installed in Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar (2002) or later.

For Mac OS X 10.1 or earlier multilingual software updates are available as free downloads from Apple's website. The Asian Language Update will install support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Mac OS X Language Support Updates at apple.com

Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu
Installing the ttf-takao-mincho package will add support for displaying Japanese text in the Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu distribution. You can do this with one of the following commands:



More fonts can be installed with this command:



Fedora/Red Hat Enterprise Linux
As of Fedora Core 4, you need fonts-chinese, fonts-japanese and/or fonts-korean. For example,
 * yum install fonts-japanese

Gentoo Linux
Install a Japanese font package, for example one of these:

Mandriva Linux 2007
Install one or several Japanese font packages. The most common is fonts-ttf-japanese, but in addition you can also install fonts-ttf-japanese-extra, fonts-ttf-japanese-ipamona and fonts-ttf-japanese-mplus_ipagothic.

Make sure you have UTF-8 fonts enabled, as they may not be if you have upgraded from a former version of Mandrake/Mandriva.

OpenSUSE 11.4
By default, the Japanese fonts are installed during the DVD standard install.

If additional Japanese fonts or Japanese language input is needed, the installation of additional packages is required.

In order to install those packages, follow the step-by-step instructions below:


 * 1) Open the YaST Control Center.
 * 2) Select System on the left panel, and then select Language (Blue flag Icon) on the right panel. -A new separate window will open-
 * 3) On the Language window scroll down the "Secondary Languages" list and mark down "Japanese"
 * 4) Click the OK button on the down-right corner. -The installation of the necessary packages for Japanese language support will begin-

Once the installation is performed a reboot is required in order to use the new language settings. This method is also valid to install support for any other language.

FreeBSD
With X.Org 7.x and above, install the package x11-fonts/font-jis-misc:



Please note that the package version may be different. Alternatively, this can be easily accomplished by installing from the ports tree:



Unicode Japanese fonts
Most modern operating systems use Unicode to display Japanese characters. Many fonts have been developed to display Japanese Unicode characters, and many of them are available for downloading over the Internet.
 * List of free Japanese fonts

Note about displaying Japanese on Wikipedia
When Japanese is included in an article on Wikipedia, it is almost always placed within a template which helps to standardize the appearance of the Japanese characters, as well as the translation and romanization of those characters. If you look at the code of the page (by clicking on the Edit tab at the top of the page or on the Edit link for that particular section), you will see something like what appears on the Code line in the following table:

This template marks the  segment as being in Japanese Kanji, which helps web browsers and other user agents to display it correctly. The template uses the following parameters


 * English. Optional. The word as translated into English. Note that this will sometimes be the actual Japanese word due to it being adopted into English.
 * Kanji/Kana. Required. The word in Japanese kanji and/or kana, the logographic writing system.
 * Romaji. Optional. The word in Japanese Romaji, the Romanized syllabic writing system used for foreign words. Also known as a "transliteration".
 * extra. Optional. Can also be expressed as a named parameter,
 * extra2. Optional. Can also be expressed as a named parameter, . It is only useful in ";" definitions (extra2 will be displayed without bold, whereas text following the template will get the bold).

Examples
Regular use:

Without :

With :

Without :

If you have questions regarding Japanese characters or the use of this template, please post your question on the talk page of WikiProject Japan.