Japanese fonts / characters

Cheetah

Our client has requested that the menus we have in our basic stamp run device
be shown in Japanese characters instead of English. Does anyone know how I would go about
doing this? Are there japanese characters or fonts available for the basic stamp?

Thanks.

Chris Savage

Hello,

Since the BASIC Stamp does not have a character set per se, the short answer is no. On the other hand LCD Displays which are commonly used for output data often do have Japanese character sets. Even our VFD Display has these characters, and the BASIC Stamp can select the characters and display them just like any other information. I hope this helps. Take care.

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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support

Cheetah

Hi. Thanks for the reply.
So are you saying that I have to find a japanese character set?
If so, how would I go about loading these into the stamp?

Thanks again.

Mike Green

Cheetah,
This is not something you load into the Stamp. What Chris is saying is that many displays already have the Japanese character set installed (at least the Katakana character set which is phonetic and doesn't have too many characters in it). Check the datasheet for the display you're using. You'll probably find Katakana characters in the range 128-255 (for character codes). All you have to do is to translate your messages into Katakana, find the codes (like 128-255) for the characters in the messages and use those when you write to the display. You're probably used to using English characters between quotes in statements like SEROUT or LCDOUT. Instead, you'd use a sequence of numbers like
SEROUT pin,Baud,[noparse][[/noparse]129,131,133,CR]
where the numbers represent the various Katakana characters.

I glanced at the VFD datasheet and they show that you can use one of 20 international character sets in the 128-255 code space, but they only show the first (#0) on the datasheet and this is basically European characters. You'd have to go to the manufacturer's website to get the documentation on the other font pages and your program would have to set the right one during initialization (there's a display command for this).

Post Edited (Mike Green) : 9/4/2007 11:42:44 PM GMT

Cheetah

Thanks Mike. That makes sense. I'm using on the the parallax displays. Not sure which one because I'm home now. I'll check in the morning. Thanks again.

LoopyByteloose

I'll try to make clear the easiest way to handle Japanese.

Japanese is divided into two character sets. One is phonetic and you can find it already available as extended ASCII on some LCDs. That is no difficulty for quick processing on a Basic Stamp and it is easily resolved in a 5 x 7 dot matrix.

The other character set is really Chinese that has been adapted to Japanese meanings. This requires a huge data base for compelte display [noparse][[/noparse]thousands of characters]. And even a few special characters are likely to be unpresentable in a 5 x 7 dot matrix grid. A significantly higher dot matrix is required, maybe 32x32.

So, if you require some combination - you will need a display that has high graphic resolution of individual characters AND the resident phonetic characters.

In sum, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese require a lot more display capacity and a lot more general memory capacity to output strings.

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"Everything in the world is purchased by labour; and our passions are the only causes of labor." -- David·Hume (1711-76)········

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Post Edited (Kramer) : 9/5/2007 3:46:57 PM GMT

Chris Savage

The Parallax Serial LCD Displays do not use the Japanese Characters. The VFD does have a complete set and the Parallax and many others (Matrix Orbital) have the Katakana Characters installed in the upper (extended) ASCII range. Please see the documentation (HD44780 datasheet) for the Parallel LCD for an example. Take care.

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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support