POPmail 2.2                               February 5, 1995

Haikei,

  David Johnson de gozaimasu.  Doozo yoroshiku.

    This version of POPmail is based on the English 2.2 version and includes
    some features that will interest people with a love of the Japanese
    Language.  The only new features added were those needed to support
    Japanese.

    This includes the ability to:

1.  Select a font and font size.
2.  Turn on the Japanese Filter option.  This runs the text through a filter
    to determine if there are Japanese codes present which need to be converted.
3.  Send Japanese as - which allows the user to choose which code set to send
    Japanese characters in.  Some of the code sets are 7 bit and some are 8 bit.


    These same features are also implemented in TurboGopher, a Gopher client for
the macintosh.

    Those who have visited the Gopher Servers in Japan will have noticed
that files often have a JIS extension (Japanese Industrial Standard),
SJIS extension (Shift-JIS, also called MS-Kanji), or an EUC extension
(Extended UNIX Code).  These signify different methods of encoding
Japanese on computer systems.

    The KanjiTalk System (available in Japan), or System 7.1 with the
Japanese Language Kit provide the ability to handle the SJIS encoding.

    The other two encoding schemes JIS, and EUC if retrieved display as
a jumble of unreadable characters no matter which font is selected.

    Fortunately, I had heard of some nice algorithms for converting JIS,
and EUC encodings into SJIS which the Macintosh can display.

    Recently an excellent book by Ken Lunde, Understanding Japanese
Information Processing (Nihongo Joho Shori) was published by
O'Reilly & Associates.  At a very reasonable cover
price of approximately $29.95.  This book is a very valuable
reference.  For those interested the ISBN is 1-56592-043-0.

    The combination of the book and some code samples, provided
the necessary knowledge to add to POPmail & TurboGopher the abiltiy to
correctly display and send Japanese.

    So give it a whirl and send comments/bug reports to:
    
          dmj@boombox.micro.umn.edu

Jaa Mata