more questions about japanese (was Re: [I18n-sig] Re: I18n)

[Peter Funk]

Hi!

[Andy Robinson]:
> There is a standard Japanese character set (Japan Industrial Standard
> 0208, or JIS-0208 for short) with  6879 characters, which has been
> more or less unchanged since 1978.  They are defined in a logical
> 94x94 space (the 'kuten table'), with some holes in it.  This
> character set is commonly encoded in three different ways, all of
> which aim for backward-compatibility with ASCII:
[...]
> All three do not contain null bytes or control characters, so most
> 8-bit-safe software works fine with data in these encodings - you
> might not be able to see Japanese in your English word processor, but
> it will be preserved intact.  All three are very widely used, and are
> the de facto encodings we have to deal with.
[...]
> Confused yet?  I could go on...  I will try to write up some decent
> background documents over the course of this month.

First let me thank you for your insightful elaboration!

And please excuse my ignorance again.  But the i18n work I was involved
with in the past was easily handled within a 8 bit clean ISO-8859-1
character space (german, english, french, italian, spanish).  So I've
some more questions to the above:

1. I guess: Word processors exists, which are able deal with text files
   containing strings in one of the encodings described above, right?  
   So is it possible to submit a .pot-File as produced by GNU xgettext 
   to a japanese translator and he/she would be able to fill in 
   the empty msgstr "" lines with japanese messages?

2. If the resulting .mo-files from 'msgfmt' will be used with a i18n'ed 
   python application, these strings will go unchanged through several layers 
   of software just as would normal ASCII-strings.  There are 
   some japanese fonts coming with XFree86 and Linux, but I've never 
   had look at them.  Would it be possible to choose such a font, and
   will this show the desired output on a X-server running on Unix/Linux?

3. What about MacOS and WinXX?  I guess, these systems will automatically
   show up the right characters, if in step 1. the translator has used 
   a word processor on the same platform?
  
Regards, Peter
-- 
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