Japanese IME

I am about to purchase a new laptop with Vista Home Basic preinstalled. I've
been told that I will need the Vista DVD/CD to install the Japanese IME - but
laptops don't generally ship with the disks anymore! Is the info I've been
given right?! Thanks

On Sat, 29 Sep 2007 13:56:00 -0700, paw1000 wrote:

> I am about to purchase a new laptop with Vista Home Basic preinstalled.
> I've been told that I will need the Vista DVD/CD to install the Japanese
> IME - but laptops don't generally ship with the disks anymore! Is the
> info I've been given right?! Thanks

You shouldn't need the DVD on a system that comes without a disk. Your
hard drive will have a partition on it that should contain everything you
need and hopefully Vista will be smart (hopefully) enough to use that.

But ultimately I suggest you go call the manufacturer you are about to
buy the laptop from and ask them about it!

--
Stephan
2003 Yamaha R6

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In the consumer market, only the Business and Home Premium editions allow
language changes. All other versions can only change languages if you
purchase the language you want, wipe the hard drive clean and start all over
again.

--
Richard G. Harper [MVP Shell/User]
* NEW! Catch my blog ... http://msmvps.com/blogs/rgharper/
* PLEASE post all messages and replies in the newsgroups
* The Website - http://rgharper.mvps.org/
* HELP us help YOU ... http://www.dts-l.org/goodpost.htm


"paw1000" <> wrote in message
news:737B44F2-3F8E-409D-A584-...
>I am about to purchase a new laptop with Vista Home Basic preinstalled.
>I've
> been told that I will need the Vista DVD/CD to install the Japanese IME -
> but
> laptops don't generally ship with the disks anymore! Is the info I've been
> given right?! Thanks

On Sun, 30 Sep 2007 05:40:40 -0400, Richard G. Harper wrote:

> In the consumer market, only the Business and Home Premium editions
> allow language changes. All other versions can only change languages if
> you purchase the language you want, wipe the hard drive clean and start
> all over again.

Richard, the IME has absolutely nothing to do with operating system
language.

You don't need to run a Japanese Language OS to be able to write in
Japanese (which is what the IME allows you to do). They are two entirely
different things.

--
Stephan
2003 Yamaha R6

������出�日�ん�����
����忘れ�������ら

"Richard G. Harper" <> wrote ...
> In the consumer market, only the Business and Home Premium editions allow
> language changes. All other versions can only change languages if you
> purchase the language you want, wipe the hard drive clean and start all
> over


This is a widespread misconception. But, with great respect ... it's wrong.

Every edition of Vista - Basic, Home, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate -
contains the support necessary to input and display text in a wide variety
of languages. The language version of Vista has no bearing on the possible
languages which can be used in an application. Apps runing on Russian Vista
Basic can display and input Chinese data; apps running on Japanese Vista can
display and input French data. And so on, for most language combinations.

It is true that additonal MUIs can only be installed on Enterprise and
Ultimate editions of Vista. That's a different matter. The MUI controls what
language Windows uses to display its own resources - menus, dialogue boxes,
etc. It also sets the default locale for the system. It does not limit the
languages which applications can use to display data or accept input.

An application can easily elect to use an explicit locale apart from the
default OS locale. Take Microsoft Office, for example - you can install a
Japanese language version of Office onto an English Vista Home Basic
edition, and it will work fine - in Japanese. You can also configure the
Japanese Language version of Office to use, say, Russian text, when running
on an English copy of Vista, and that will work fine too.

What you *cannot* do, is change the display name of a Windows resource
string like, say, "Control Panel" or "Recent Items" to some other language.
For that, you need the MUI; and the MUI can only be installed on Enterprise
and Ultimate editions.

If an application does not set an explicit codepage, it will use whatever
the default OS locale is. This is when you get Chinese text for example
displayed as a row of square boxes, question marks, or the like. The
solution there is to configure an explicit default locale for non-Unicode
applications. This facility works exactly the same, on all editions of
Vista.

Admittedly, Microsoft themselves have generated a lot of this confusion, by
being perversely restrictive about distributing language resources - MUIs
for Ultimate only, for example. In a globalised world, you'd think it makes
sense for everyone to mix'n'match languages freely. Fortunately, Vista is
part of the way there: there's no obstacle to installing a Japanese IME on
Home Basic edition.

Regards,
--
Andrew McLaren
amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au

"Andrew McLaren" <> wrote in message
news:36CA309E-D0B6-455A-98FE-...
> "Richard G. Harper" <> wrote ...
>> In the consumer market, only the Business and Home Premium editions allow
>> language changes. All other versions can only change languages if you
>> purchase the language you want, wipe the hard drive clean and start all
>> over
>
>
> This is a widespread misconception. But, with great respect ... it's
> wrong.
>
> Every edition of Vista - Basic, Home, Business, Enterprise, Ultimate -
> contains the support necessary to input and display text in a wide variety
> of languages. The language version of Vista has no bearing on the possible
> languages which can be used in an application. Apps runing on Russian
> Vista Basic can display and input Chinese data; apps running on Japanese
> Vista can display and input French data. And so on, for most language
> combinations.
>
> It is true that additonal MUIs can only be installed on Enterprise and
> Ultimate editions of Vista. That's a different matter. The MUI controls
> what language Windows uses to display its own resources - menus, dialogue
> boxes, etc. It also sets the default locale for the system. It does not
> limit the languages which applications can use to display data or accept
> input.
>
> An application can easily elect to use an explicit locale apart from the
> default OS locale. Take Microsoft Office, for example - you can install a
> Japanese language version of Office onto an English Vista Home Basic
> edition, and it will work fine - in Japanese. You can also configure the
> Japanese Language version of Office to use, say, Russian text, when
> running on an English copy of Vista, and that will work fine too.
>
> What you *cannot* do, is change the display name of a Windows resource
> string like, say, "Control Panel" or "Recent Items" to some other
> language. For that, you need the MUI; and the MUI can only be installed on
> Enterprise and Ultimate editions.
>
> If an application does not set an explicit codepage, it will use whatever
> the default OS locale is. This is when you get Chinese text for example
> displayed as a row of square boxes, question marks, or the like. The
> solution there is to configure an explicit default locale for non-Unicode
> applications. This facility works exactly the same, on all editions of
> Vista.
>
> Admittedly, Microsoft themselves have generated a lot of this confusion,
> by being perversely restrictive about distributing language resources -
> MUIs for Ultimate only, for example. In a globalised world, you'd think it
> makes sense for everyone to mix'n'match languages freely. Fortunately,
> Vista is part of the way there: there's no obstacle to installing a
> Japanese IME on Home Basic edition.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Andrew McLaren
> amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au

Hi, Andrew
You say:
> The solution there is to configure an explicit default locale for
> non-Unicode applications. This facility works exactly the same, on all
> editions of Vista.

This process takes a lot of clicks.
Control Panel -> Clock, Language, and Region -> Change Country or Region ->
Administrative tab -> Change System Locale -> select from a long list of
languages.

Some questions:

1) Do you know of a batch file or scripting way to change to a specific
language for non-Unicode applications?

2) Some languages like Maltese, don't appear in the long list of languages.
Is that because Maltese is a Unicode-only encoding and there can be no
non-Unicode applications that use Maltese?

3) If answer to 2 is 'yes', then do you know of a list of such Unicode-only
languages?

4) Do you know of a free non-unicode application that ships with Vista or
from elsewhere that a newbie to this language/locale/region stuff can use to
demonstrate the effect of changing the locale in this way? Is there a
tutorial URL? I suppose one would need the correct fonts installed to see
the effect?

Thanks,

-Paul Randall

Hi Paul,

> 1) Do you know of a batch file or scripting way to change to a specific
> language for non-Unicode applications?

The only way I know is to pass an XML file as parameter to intl.cpl:

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/v...iguration.mspx

The "SystemLocale" element of the XML file sets the language to use, for
non-Unicode programs.

As Michael Kaplan explained in one of his blog entries - updating the locale
involves complex logic which isn't exposed as a script-level API. In
VBScript you can query the locale with GetLocale:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d457t70w.aspx

... but you can't SET the locale with a "SetLocale". Instead, you need to
call the complex logic embedded in intl.cpl

> 2) Some languages like Maltese, don't appear in the long list of
> languages. Is that because Maltese is a Unicode-only encoding and there
> can be no non-Unicode applications that use Maltese?

Not necessarily; it just means that single-byte character set support for
the language is not available in that copy of Windows. Some languages do
have pre-Unicode codepages, but are not included in the list of available
languages, just because the NLS codepage files are not installed in Windows.
The list of codepages installed by default is fairly comprehensive however,
for "major world languages" (not that I like that term).

Prior to Unicode, single byte encodings were pretty messy. There wasn't a
nice neat set of pre-Unicode encodings. Take Greek, for example: there were
many different proprietary schemes used to display Greek script and language
using single bytes - WinGreek, GreekKeys, etc. Many of these requiresd
special drivers to be installed. So you can't just turn on non-Unicode
Greek, and hope that it will work (well, you can *hope* it will work; but
.... hoping is all you can do :-).

In the case of Maltese, I'm not sure what kind of pre-Unicode or non-Unicode
(ie, single-byte) encodings were available. I don't know of any ANSI
codepage for Maltese. I suspect Maltese non-Unicode encoding schemes were
pretty proprietary: keyboard and display drivers, to get the "G with a dot
on top", "C with a dot on top", "H with a bar", etc.

> 3) If answer to 2 is 'yes', then do you know of a list of such
> Unicode-only languages?

Well, these languages aren't "unicode-only" But here's a useful list of
languages, supported in Vista:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/n...indows%20Vista

If the ANSI column is "0" then, there is no ANSI codepage support in
Windows. I guess that's roughly equivalent to "Unicode only".


> 4) Do you know of a free non-unicode application that ships with Vista or
> from elsewhere that a newbie to this language/locale/region stuff can use
> to demonstrate the effect of changing the locale in this way? Is there a
> tutorial URL? I suppose one would need the correct fonts installed to see
> the effect?

I should probably write one :-)

On XP, you can experiment a bit with different locales, by using the
AppLocale utility:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/apploc.mspx

However Applocale does not run on Vista. I guess the World-ready guys at
Microsoft will come out with an updated version at some stage; but they
probably have more pressing priorities right now.

Also some useful info here:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/g...rg_lclmdl.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/D...s/Locales.mspx

In fact *every* page under the Globaldev portal is pretty useful; I think we
discussed that a couple of weeks ago.

There are several good books. I found this one very useful:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735615837/
although, it is rather oriented towards developers writing in C/C++. But,
lots of good info.

Hope it helps,
--
Andrew McLaren
amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au

I have just picked up on this thread because I have purchased a new laptop in
the US for use by my mother in law in Brazil. It is preinstalled with Vista
Home Premium. At initial setup, I selected English as the default language,
planning to set everything up and then change the language to Portuguese
before I hand it over. Big mistake.

I seem to be unable to set the display language in Windows to Portuguese. I
have successfully set the keyboard language and the locale to Portuguese and
copied it to the Reserve Accounts, but all Windows text continues to appear
in English. In the Control Panel Regional Languages Tab, no Display Languages
are shown. The help text indicates that display languages will display only
if an LIP has been installed or if the version of Windows supports MUI packs.

Vista Home Premium does not support MUI packs and the list of available
LIP's for download is eclectic to say the least. It certainly does not
include Portuguese.

I would therefore qualify Richard's assertion that Vista Premium allows
language changes. As far as I can tell, it allows a language selection at
initial start up, but thereafter, it does not allow another display language
to be selected. The only options seem to be to buy another Windows Vista Home
Premium copy or to upgrade to Vista Ultimate to be able to use an MYUI pack.

If anyone has any suggestions, then I am eager to find out, preferably
before my mother in law gets home!


"Richard G. Harper" wrote:

> In the consumer market, only the Business and Home Premium editions allow
> language changes. All other versions can only change languages if you
> purchase the language you want, wipe the hard drive clean and start all over
> again.
>
> --
> Richard G. Harper [MVP Shell/User]
> * NEW! Catch my blog ... http://msmvps.com/blogs/rgharper/
> * PLEASE post all messages and replies in the newsgroups
> * The Website - http://rgharper.mvps.org/
> * HELP us help YOU ... http://www.dts-l.org/goodpost.htm
>
>
> "paw1000" <> wrote in message
> news:737B44F2-3F8E-409D-A584-...
> >I am about to purchase a new laptop with Vista Home Basic preinstalled.
> >I've
> > been told that I will need the Vista DVD/CD to install the Japanese IME -
> > but
> > laptops don't generally ship with the disks anymore! Is the info I've been
> > given right?! Thanks
>
>

Hi,

I suspect that Richard meant "only Business and Ultimate editions allow
language changes". No Home editions support MUI language packs.

On initial install of Home Premium, you selected English. If you had tried
to select another language, you would have found that the only choice was,
in fact, English. A PC bought in France would have French installed, in
Japan, Japanese. The installation DVDs are separate for each language -
OEMs preinstall the language that would be expected to be used in a
particular country/market.


--
Jane, not plain 64 bit enabled :-)
Batteries not included. Braincell on vacation ;-)
MVP Windows Shell/User

"Kenkenboy" <> wrote in message
news:633AEF6C-332C-44B4-92B2-...
>I have just picked up on this thread because I have purchased a new laptop
>in
> the US for use by my mother in law in Brazil. It is preinstalled with
> Vista
> Home Premium. At initial setup, I selected English as the default
> language,
> planning to set everything up and then change the language to Portuguese
> before I hand it over. Big mistake.
>
> I seem to be unable to set the display language in Windows to Portuguese.
> I
> have successfully set the keyboard language and the locale to Portuguese
> and
> copied it to the Reserve Accounts, but all Windows text continues to
> appear
> in English. In the Control Panel Regional Languages Tab, no Display
> Languages
> are shown. The help text indicates that display languages will display
> only
> if an LIP has been installed or if the version of Windows supports MUI
> packs.
>
> Vista Home Premium does not support MUI packs and the list of available
> LIP's for download is eclectic to say the least. It certainly does not
> include Portuguese.
>
> I would therefore qualify Richard's assertion that Vista Premium allows
> language changes. As far as I can tell, it allows a language selection at
> initial start up, but thereafter, it does not allow another display
> language
> to be selected. The only options seem to be to buy another Windows Vista
> Home
> Premium copy or to upgrade to Vista Ultimate to be able to use an MYUI
> pack.
>
> If anyone has any suggestions, then I am eager to find out, preferably
> before my mother in law gets home!
>
>
> "Richard G. Harper" wrote:
>
>> In the consumer market, only the Business and Home Premium editions allow
>> language changes. All other versions can only change languages if you
>> purchase the language you want, wipe the hard drive clean and start all
>> over
>> again.
>>
>> --
>> Richard G. Harper [MVP Shell/User]
>> * NEW! Catch my blog ... http://msmvps.com/blogs/rgharper/
>> * PLEASE post all messages and replies in the newsgroups
>> * The Website - http://rgharper.mvps.org/
>> * HELP us help YOU ... http://www.dts-l.org/goodpost.htm
>>
>>
>> "paw1000" <> wrote in message
>> news:737B44F2-3F8E-409D-A584-...
>> >I am about to purchase a new laptop with Vista Home Basic preinstalled.
>> >I've
>> > been told that I will need the Vista DVD/CD to install the Japanese
>> > IME -
>> > but
>> > laptops don't generally ship with the disks anymore! Is the info I've
>> > been
>> > given right?! Thanks
>>
>>