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In article <aat2d0$d8d6v$1@ID-141600.news.dfncis.de>, mr.sumo
<mr_sumo@hotmail.com> wrote:

> "Shannon Jacobs" <shanen@my-deja.com> wrote in message
> news:c5862fb7.0205021952.32de2416@posting.google.com...
> > I'm a relative newbie with a Japanese CLIE (though my Grafitti speed
> > is already up to 28 wpm for English). Of course Japanese software
> > works fine, but sometimes the non-Japanese programs have display
> > problems. The problems seem to be font-related, usually involving
> > reverse (left) quotes, apostrophes, and other special characters.
> >
> > As a concrete example of an affected program, Adobe has a new version
> > of their reader for the Palm OS. It gave a warning about an
> > unsupported OS, but it runs pretty well. However, some of the text has
> > glitches. For example, the contraction "It's" might appear as
> > "It<garbage>", where <garbage> is a little gray box or a random kanji.
> > For this particular program, there's no sign Adobe is working on a
> > Japanese version. The Japanese site doesn't even have the old version
> > of the Palm OS reader.
> >
> > Concrete suggestions or workarounds? Maybe it's something as obvious
> > as a mode switch in the Japanese version of the Palm OS for use when
> > running non-Japanese programs. However, so far I haven't stumbled over
> > it. Or maybe something tricky can be done with font substitution,
> > though I'd hate to be the first to try it... The Japanese OS has four
> > font settings, but they are actually for pairs of fonts, one Latin and
> > one Japanese.

I don't think there are work arounds.  This is an issue of over-lapping
code tables for encoding text.  There are certain western characters --
like curly quotes and curly appostrophes (as opposed to straight quotes
or appostrophes) -- that are not part of the standard original ASCII
encoding scheme, but utilize what I think are called high-ASCII.  The
S-JIS code tables (which the Japanese Palms use to display text) are
identical to ASCII code tables for the standard ASCII characters (this
is why Japnaese models can display most English text without any
problems).  But, for high-ASCII characters (special characters,
accents, etc.) the code table is not replicated in S-JIS.  Instead, the
high-ASCII characters overlap with the first byte of two-byte Kanji in
the S-JIS code tables.  This is why if you have "it's" the curly
appostrophe is interpreted as the first byte of the two-byte Kanji code
and "'s" is translated into a single Kanji character.  Try the same
text, but use straight apostrophe instead, and it will display
correctly.

In fact, you can replicate this using a web browser on your PC.  Open a
web page with special characters in it, even if it is just curly
quotes.  (A Skandinavian page with all their special characters is
nice.)  Now use the encoding menu to force the page to display as if it
were encoded S-JIS.  You will notice that special characters and the
letter that follwos them are now displayed with random kanji.

So, in order to get text with special characters to display correctly,
you would need to have an app running in the background that translates
ASCII to S-JIS equivalents for English apps.  Probably beyond the scope
or capabilities of Palm devices.  I think there was a piece of software
that does this to a very limited extent (I think it was called tofu
busters, or some such) that allowed the "..." in menus to be displayed
correctly in English apps.  But nothing that does this in a
comprehensive way.

I guess we just all get used to this, and live with it.  Of course, we
could hope that at some point Palm will Unicode (which has no
over-lapping code table problems) in the future.