Japanese (kanji, katakana, Hiragana) in FM

[Andre]

Hi there,

This is my first post... so if my question is too simple and the answer can be found in a FAQ... please point me in the right direction.

I am presently working on an educational project in which i have to create a database of about 3000 japanese characters and their related JIS and EUC code... anyone here had experience working with both the character and the code side by side in FM pro 6 english version in an OSX environment... any issues i should know about? I am not planning to search using the japanese character itself... only some of it's attributes (such as stroke count, skip number etc...) I know that this is a problematic issue since the english search engine does not support 2 bytes character searches.

I'll certainly will have more precise questions in the near future... but just want to know if FM pro is the right tool and if the 2 byte font are well supported in the english version....

thanks in advance!

[BobWeaver]

I have set up a little database for learning Kanji. It's a bit quirky because of Filemaker's lack of support for various text encodings. However, I have been able to get both kanji and kana into fields and have them display properly. The only real problem that I noticed is that Filemaker sometimes cuts off a bit of the characters when displaying or printing them. I corrected for that by padding some spaces on the end of the text.

I'm still running on OS9, so you may run into other problems on OSX.

I have attached a file that has about 70 kanji in it so far. It also has the corresponding JIS and Nelson numbers. It is based on the subset of about 1800 given in the James Heisig book "Remembering the Kanji." So the kanji have been entered in the order in which they appear in the book.

It also contains a script which functions like flashcards, allowing the user to practice drawing the kanji from memory given only their keywords presented in random order.