Support for JCK (double byte languages) esp. Japanese

[justme]

I don't need a localisation into Japanese, but I've got tons of Illustrator files with Japanese text in them. All the text is scrambled when I open them in Affinity Designer, so I can't really edit any of those existing files.

[Dave Harris]

Scrambled in what way? Do the characters not come in, or are they laid out wrong? Could you attach a sample file for us to look at?

[Hokusai]

justme,

 

I live in Japan and I sometimes use Japanese and it works fine for me. I'm guessing that your Illustrator files are using a Japanese font that you no longer have and so Affinity is defaulting it to a western font (like Arial or Helvetica) and those fonts can't display the Japanese characters so it shows them as rectangular boxes. I have attached a sample that shows a Japanese word (two hiragana characters "Ze" and "N") set in two different fonts. In a Japanese font, it shows up fine. In Helvetica Neue, it doesn't show up at all and instead shows only two rectangles. Do you have any Japanese fonts installed? If so, try highlighting the messed up text and then change the font to a Japanese font and it should work. 

 

Hokusai

[michaelmee]

I've encountered the same obstacle.

 

I'm attempting to create a web page mockup with Japanese text using Arial. The characters are available in my web browser but appear as rectangles in Affinity Designer.

 

I've had to resort to entering the text the browser then copy-pasting the pixels themselves into Affinity Designer.

[Hokusai]

michaelmee,

 

I'm not 100% certain but I would guess that for some reason the Arial that you are using with Affinity Designer isn't the same as the one that you are using to create your web page mockup. There are actually many different versions of Arial, many of them have them even have the same name as they are actually different versions released at different times by Microsoft (and of course other venders also have their own versions of Arial and they could be different as well). I believe that even with an Arial that has Japanese characters, it doesn't contain them all so occasionally you will get the blank rectangle because you are trying to use a character that the font doesn't include. Not all Japanese fonts contain all the characters (they normally contain all the Hiragana, Katakana, and most of the basic Kanji characters but there are many Kanji characters and some fonts don't contain them all). I have Arial (regular) and Arial MS Unicode. Arial doesn't have Japanese characters at all and Arial MS Unicode does. I hope it helps. 

 

Hokusai