JD on EP

One of my co-workers (Chuck Genco) came up with a pretty clever system for handling Asian characters. On the Japanese sites we've worked on, there has been a fairly mixed collection of Japanese and English. In order to handle this, Chuck would thumb through the text before inserting it in a text field to see if it consisted of all English characters. If it was all English, he would flip the textfield to an embedded font. If it contained any Asian chracters, he would flip it to a system font. This allowed the site to have both asian and western characters, but the western characters would still be anti-aliased.

You can see his work in action here (select japanese):
http://nikeid.nike.com/nikeid/index.jhtml

There are a lot of assets with static Japanese text in it, but if you drill down to dynamic pieces you'll see the switching in action. For example if you enter the Japanese version and select store locator on the bottom and scroll around in the window, you'll see a mixture of embedded and system text. Also if you check out the product copy or the product builder and flip between the Japanese and English language versions, you'll see it's embedded in English and system text in Japanese.

that's good it's a new thing to me. thanks

The problem is that you cannot use any non-standard fonts for 2-byte languages without getting your SWF bloated to several megabytes. For Japanese projects we always had to use the system fonts for any dynamic textfields. This is really limiting but it's the nature of 2-byte languages (unless someday somebody comes up with a wonder invention ;) ).