Dealing with Chinese / Japanese content?

[doodler85]

Hey guys,

How do you deal with dynamic Chinese and Japanese content? I work with a client that has a great deal of international sites, but until recently they all used english and latin characters (english, spanish, french, german, etc.). Our content is populated via XML, and therefore we need to embed all of the necessary characters somehow... but there're 21,500 possible Chinese glyphs and 7,500 Japanese, so using all of them is unfeasible. I tried embedding all of them as a test and it inflated file size by 17 megs.

My temporary solution is to embed all of the characters that each page is going to use by copy-pasting the XML content into a text field on a loading frame. This works in a static sort of context, but if the client ever wanted to change their copy it'd end up including a .swf update. Not too dynamic of a system :)

So have you guys run into this before? What did you do about it? Any suggestions or resources?

Thanks!

[callumd]

As long as your pages are encoded with UTF-8, you should be fine using Japanese and Chinese characters.

Here's a tutorial I wrote on character sets with HTML (http://easytutes.blogspot.com/2008/01/html-charset-character-sets-and.html), it might be of some help to you.

[doodler85]

As long as your pages are encoded with UTF-8, you should be fine using Japanese and Chinese characters.
How would that make additional characters available to Flash's fonts? Does it affect the default character set somehow, or did you assume I was building the page outside of Flash with HTML text?

[callumd]

..or did you assume I was building the page outside of Flash with HTML text?
Yes, that is what I assumed you were doing.. if the problem is occurring in a Flash app, then unfortunately I can't be much help..

[doodler85]

Yeah, it's within Flash. Sorry, I should have been more specific... I swear I mentioned that earlier :'(