As you can see from http://133.14.174.35/transTest3/ it is possible to render Japanese and other languages in UTF-8 from Manila. (That site is very buggy at the moment. I have a much updated, but still by no means perfect version which I will try to install soon. You are welcome to play around if you like. But as far as enabling of multi-script writing is concerned, I have done nothing more than Emmanuel did on his site; I just set the page encoding to UTF-8 rather than Chinese).

In my experience the problem with writing mixed text in Manila messages is not a Frontier/Manila problem but a browser problem. If the page with the input form is encoded as UTF-8 then all the code that reaches Frontier is UTF-8. But on my machine at least (Mac OS10.1, IE 5.1, and previous versions of Mac0S), it's not possible to write e.g. German with umlauts and Japanese together on the same HTML form. Or at least you can write them but one script or the other is illegible. Nevertheless, even though some of the text is illegible it is, it seems, all being sent to and stored in, and then displayed by Frontier correctly. So for example just now I wrote a message in the input form on the above site, and German umlauts displayed fine but Japanese text was illegible. Then after posting the message Manila displayed it; this time the Japanese text was fine but the German was illegible. Then when I click Edit this Page the German is fine but the Japanese is illegible. I post the changes, now the German is illegible but the Japanese is fine.

No doubt I am failing to make some elementary adjustments to my browser's font settings to make it display mixed text correctly. (Perhaps I should get hold of Arial Unicode?) But my point here is that this seems to be a browser display problem and not a Frontier/Manila problem. The text itself is surviving the posting/displaying/editing process.

I am not arguing that Frontier has no problems handling Unicode text, simply that just having Japanese, or indeed mixed scripts in Manila messages is not by itself impossible.

Best wishes,

Jonathan Lewis

Tokyo Denki University

(From April 1st: Hitotsubashi University)

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