Help:Installing Japanese character sets

This help page will help you install Japanese character sets so that your computer will display them properly on the internet in your web browser as all modern operating systems and web browsers support Japanese fonts. Throughout Wikipedia, Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are used in specific articles. Many computers with English or other Western operating systems do not show them by default.

Check for support

This is Japanese text as it appears on Japanese websites and Wikipedia:

すべての人間は、生まれながらにして自由であり、
かつ、尊厳と権利とについて平等である。
人間は、理性と良心とを授けられており、
互いに同胞の精神をもって行動しなければならない。

Compare it to this image of what it should look like:

If you see boxes, question marks or mojibake in the first part rather than the characters shown in the image, your system is not currently configured to properly display Japanese characters. Please follow the directions listed below for your specific operating system. If you do not see your operating system listed here, please inquire in the talk page or on the Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing page.

Specific operating systems

Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu

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

apt-get install ttf-kochi-mincho

Fedora

Install the appropriate ttfonts packages.

For Fedora Core 3, the packages are ttfonts-zh_TW (traditional Chinese), ttfonts-zh_CN (simplified Chinese), ttfonts-ja (Japanese) and ttfonts-ko (Korean). For example,

yum install ttfonts-ja

As of Fedora Core 4, you need fonts-chinese, fonts-japanese and/or fonts-korean.

FreeBSD

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

pkg_add -r font-jis-misc-1.0.0.tbz

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

cd /usr/ports/x11-fonts/font-jis-misc && make install clean

Gentoo GNU/Linux

Install a Japanese font package. The most common is ja-ipafonts.

emerge media-fonts/ja-ipafonts

Also, put useflag 'cjk' to /etc/make.conf and update your system

emerge -uDN world

Mac OS X

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

For Mac OS X 10.1 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

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

If you install it from DVD, you don’t need to install anything.

Unicode Japanese fonts

List of free Japanese fonts

Windows

95, 98, ME and NT

Your system should offer to download Asian fonts by default while viewing pages in those languages, just as long as you're using Internet Explorer. [1]

Otherwise, update your system manually with these language support packs: here

2000

Instructions for Windows 2000

XP and Server 2003

The Windows CD-ROM is needed while installing support for East Asian languages. (Non-East Asian localizations only)

Instructions for Windows XP and Server 2003

Alternatively, you can download the Japanese language pack by itself from Microsoft by going to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=24a66277-cd9f-4332-a6f1-52b85a6470bd. No disc is needed for this option.

Windows Vista

Windows Vista includes proper support for Japanese characters by default. You can type in Japanese or view Japanese with the default tools.