Japanese characters not shown correctly on the page title or on the keywords (meta)

[beanie3556]

Hello,
First, I would like to thank you all so very much for previous support and advice that I have received from you guys on the forum.

I the work of transfering an existing website, made in Dreamweaver some years ago to another web host, and now recreating the same site with Xara web designer, I have a problem with Japanese characters not showing correctly on the page title, nor in the keywords, on a website that I am creating with Xara Web designer 365.

Here is what I have done.

1) In the "names", when marking any object, I added the name "charset=UTF-8"
2) In the page web properties, I have entered page title and keywords in Japanese.


3) Previewing the website with Firefox and checking "Page Source", I find out that the html code does not show the "title" and "keywords" correctly.


As a comparison to the old live website, the title shows correctly and source code also shows the keywords correctly with Japanese characters.



Do you have any ideas on how I should go from here in order to fix this problem?
What have I missed?

Any suggestions on how to solve this problem would be a the greatest value for me.

Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Best Regards,
Bjorn

[Egg Bramhill]

Hi Bjorn, this is a question that comes up fairly regularly but I have never required to use a foriegn language. I note your site seems happy with Japenese, just the page names, content, metatags, etc fail

Copy ALL the text below and paste it into Google:

site:www.talkgraphics.com/ + non english characters

[beanie3556]

Dear Egg,
Thank you very much for your reply. For using my site commercially, I need the Japanese page name and metatags to work properly. I followed your suggestion about pasting into Google. I think it is a character encoding problem. I changed the character encoding of my web browser from "unicode" to "Japanese Shift_JIS". Then both metadata and page name showed correctly. See below screenshot.




I cannot very well ask all my visitors to change the character encoding of their web browser.

I am lacking some understanding here regarding the character encoding and how it works with Xara web designer.

I thought that setting the "Charset=UTF-8", would result in that all web browsers would be able to interpret the Japanese characters correctly.
That may be true for the text shown in the body, but I am at loss how to make it work in the page title and metatags.

Any thoughts and ideas on how to move forwards are highly appreciated.

Thanks again all of you in advance for your great support on the forum.

Looking forward to more replies until I get this solved.

Best Regards,
Bjorn



UPDATE:

Furthermore, I also took two screenshots when experimenting with the character encoding of my browswer. Please see below:




Left side of the PIC shows when the character encoding is set to "UTF-8" and the right side shows when it is set to "Shift_JIS".
In XWD, I have set the character encoding to "Charset=UTF-8". As you can see the Japanese characters shows correctly when the character encoding of my browser is set ti "Shift_JIS". Does this indicate the text out put is Shift_JIS, even though I have it set to UTF-8 in XWD?

What do you think?

[Egg Bramhill]

I honestly don't know Beanie, beyond my paygrade.

I did a search using the following;

Japanese page name and metatags

Don't know if this helps:

https://www.webmasterworld.com/forum32/845.htm

[beanie3556]

Hi Egg,
Thank you so very much for your reply.
Your link to webmasterworld was very helpful for me.

Somewhere in that thread I read a comment from a user with the nickname "Takagi", which is presumingly a Japanese person.

He wrote below:
Only use 'UTF-8' if the page is really in Unicode, some other encodings found on Japanese pages are:

Shift_JIS (or x-sjis)
euc-jp
iso-2022-jp


So I tried changing the charset from UTF-8 to Shift_JIS and how my page name and meta tags shows correctly.
I suspect that Xara maybe not export the page in entire Unicode since when I had the charset set to UTF-8 my browsers detected the page as UTF-8, but the text in page title and meta tags did not show correctly due to encoding mismatch.

Until now, I have always believed that UTF-8 was the safest way to allow proper appearance of both English and non-english characters.

Now my problem seems to be solved, however, I need to verify from a couple of Japanese users - that they all are able to show the characters properly.

Has anyone else on the forum any ideas on this, please feel free to comment.

Mr. Egg - your help was of greatest importance to me. I want to express my sincerest thanks.

Thank you very much.

Best Regards,
Beanie

[Egg Bramhill]

Doomo arigatoo. I'm only glad i was of assistance although I haven't a clue regarding ths subject, just did some Googling but hopefuly glad to hear you've sorted it.

[beanie3556]

Hi Egg,
I have heard someone say "It is not difficult to find the right answer. The difficult thing is to ask the right question".

Your googling was helpful for me. I googled too, but maybe not with the right questions. Thank you very much.

Cheers!

//Beanie