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Nov 2021

This is something I've wondered about for years, and now I actually have a large enough grasp of Japanese for the knowledge to be useful to me. ^^

So let's say I have a comic and I want to do the text in katakana...how do I go about this? Do I need to download some kind of katakana font? How does the input work (obviously you can't just type letters, because they aren't letters...unless each symbol is hot-keyed to a letter)? If I wanted to use hiragana too, would I need a separate font, or is it a sort of Shift-key scenario?

And I hesitate to ask about kanji, but honestly if you're going to write actual sentences in Japanese you'll need it sooner or later. How...does that work??

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    Nov '21
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    Dec '21
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For Windows machines, I think there should be Japanese fonts already installed, you would just need to make sure you go into your computer's language settings and add Japanese to it.

Once you added it in, you can switch between language inputs in your taskbar:

And yes, you actually can just type letters! Clicking that A after switching to Japanese input lets you toggle between English characters and Japanese characters:

As you type, your input will automatically convert to Hiragana and if you press the space bar, a drop-down menu pops up letting you choose the Katakana characters or Kanji that matches what you typed.

Example: Here's me typing "watashi":

If the characters you want aren't showing up, just keep pressing space until you find what you need.

In addition to what PKLucky said,
there are some fonts that does support japanese characters, if you are on windows and use csp, the font DengXian can be used for Japanese and Chinese characters.


if you want to type small hiragana, type an 'x' in front of the hiragana.

There is a method that Jap ppl use to quickly type certain hiraganas with keyboard. つ can be typed as "tu" and the keyboard will auto make it つ (tsu).
し (shi) -> si
つ (tsu) -> tu
ち (chi) -> ti

1 month later

closed Dec 14, '21

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