“I once dropped an alien spacecraft on top of the main train station in Zürich because I didn’t like the floor tile they’d installed during a renovation.”
— Diane Duane, on destroying cities (and the Avengers movie)Automagic JIS/ShiftJIS/EUC to UTF8
Finally got sick of constantly dealing with the variety of encoding schemes used for Japanese text files. I still convert everything to UTF-8 before any serious use, but for just looking at a random downloaded file, I wanted to eliminate a step.
less supports input filters with the LESSOPEN environment variable, but you need something to put into it. Turns out the Perl Encode::Guess module works nicely for this, and now I no longer care if a file is JIS, ShiftJIS, CP932, EUC-JP, or UTF-8. Code below the fold.
Someone really didn't like Gakuen Kino...
In Kino’s Journeys, the title character is a teenage girl who travels the wilderness on her talking motorcycle, stopping only briefly in each isolated city-state she finds, observing life while reserving judgement, surviving unpleasant encounters using her wits and pistols.
Gakuen Kino is a parody spin-off, featuring magical girl Kino and her talking cellphone strap, fighting monsters in a not-so-ordinary high school.
I’ve read several of the Kino stories, and have finished about 33% 68% 98% of the first novel, but I found the mere existence of Gakuen Kino so amusing that I bought it on sight, and hope to read it at some point. Sadly, while it has been scanned in, no OCR’d, proofread edition is available, so I can’t run it through my scripts to speed up the reading experience. It will have to wait.
I grabbed the scans to get the interior illustrations, but I noticed something a bit unusual about them. The zip file correctly lists it as 学園キノ by 時雨沢恵一, but when you unpack it, the directory claims to contain 面白くないキノ by オナニ沢ケーイチ.
For the kana-deprived, the title has been changed to Omoshirokunai Kino (Boring Kino), by Onani-sawa Keiichi instead of Sigusawa Keiichi. Onani means masturbation. The scans match my copy of the book, so it’s just editorial commentary rather than vandalism, but still a bit of a surprise.
Anyway, here’s one of the color plates from inside the book. No onani, please!
Dear Amazon,
Presenting some random guy’s download from Project Gutenberg as if it were the Kindle edition of an in-copyright book by a respected translator is not acceptable. I can’t safely order anything from your listing of Jay Rubin’s translation of Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories, because there are clearly several different books here. Even the featured editorial review refers to someone else’s translation. Worse, the page changes slightly each time I reload it, apparently due to different indexing on different servers.
If I ignore the official link from his author page, and search by his name or by its ISBN, I find the real book here. But if I trust your listings, I’m screwed.
(yes, I sent in feedback; hopefully someone will clean up the mess)
Visit Beautiful Sidzd!
I have recently developed some sympathy for 19th-Century cartographers. In 1815, Japan was a rather mysterious place, and making a detailed map with romanized placenames can’t have been easy.
Sidzd was apparently Settsu Province.
Map detail extracted from this item at the Library of Congress’ American Memory site. (you’ll need JPEG2000 and MrSID decoders to work with the largest available images; yes, they chose encumbered, poorly-supported formats to store everything…)
Bridging The Gulf of Kanji
Imagine that you’re reading something in a foreign language that you’ve been studying for a while, and you hit an unfamiliar word. You know how to pronounce it, so you can often tell if it’s a place or a person’s name, and you’re pretty sure how many words you’re looking at, so if you need to look them up, you can.
When studying Japanese, the most frustrating thing about trying to graduate from reading “student material” to “real stuff” is not being able to do that. You’re reading along, feeling pretty good about yourself, and you run smack into a wall of kanji. Maybe it’s someone’s name, maybe it’s a city you’d recognize if you could pronounce it, or maybe it’s something like 厳重機密保持体制.
Taken individually, you know most or all of the characters, but together, wtf? Is it safe to skip over and work out from context, or do you need to carefully look up each character, crossing your fingers and hoping that it’s a straightforward collection of two-character nouns (which it is, by the way; literally “strictly-classified-preservation-system”, or, more loosely, “seriously top-secret”). Every time you stop to look something like this up, you lose continuity, and instead of reading, you’re deciphering.
I am far from the first person to notice this, and there are some well-developed tools for helping you read a Japanese web site, of which perhaps the best-known is Rikai. I don’t use it. I will occasionally use the built-in pop-up J-E dictionary on my Mac, which is a simpler version of the same thing, but what I really want to do is read books and short stories.
PDF metadata on Kindle
PDF version 1.5 doesn’t work for metadata (apparently because it compresses objects to reduce the output size); save as 1.3 for it to be parsed correctly, and you’ll still need to set the filename to the title you want displayed in the main book listing, even though the device actually parses it out of the file to display on the detail page. Blech.
You can insert the metadata with pdftk as per bloovis, or some other tools (the full version of Adobe Acrobat works great, but is not exactly free…). LaTeX users can use a sledgehammer to swat this fly with the hyperref package, but you’ll need to use dvipdfmx -V3 to downrev the PDF output to 1.3.
Sony got their PDF software from Adobe (for the DRM, mostly), so their Readers don’t have this problem. Sadly, this means that a file generated for the Kindle will display much slower on the Sony, since the object-compression is quite useful.
"That's not the way mommy tells it!"
“Shut up, kid; that’s the way I tell it.”
There’s a fresh manga adaptation of the original Dirty Pair SF novels running in Japan (via The Leaning Tower of Damocles). I will cheerfully confess that I didn’t like the illustration style used for the novels, but I’m not sure this is an improvement. I’ll take the Eighties anime & comic versions, please; these are a bit over the top.
