LiveType Japanese Fonts
 

Trying to create a few graphics in LiveType (or Photoshop or Final Cut Pro) using fonts that show up in FontBook as Japanese characters. Yet when I select the fonts and type they display as English. Tried both Photoshop CS3 and Final Cut Pro 6 and the same thing happened. Am I missing something simple? My goal is to create the same word in different languages that utilize different characters.

Thanks.

Most Japanese fonts also include a Roman alphabet set, in addition to Kanji (Chinese ideographs) and the 2 Japanese syllabaries, hiragana and katakana. If you just start typing away, you'll just get the Roman alphabet characters from that font.

If you want to enter hiragana/katakana/kanji, you need to install the Japanese "Kotoeri" input method by enabling it in System Prefs-International-Input Menu. Of course, typing in English words won't give you recognizable or correct Japanese words even using a Japanese font. You need to know the pronunciation of the Japanese word and enter its romanization via the keyboard. For example, to enter the character 人 ("hito", person), you switch to the Kotoeri input method and then type h-i-t-o which will give you the hiragana ひと ("hi" and "to"), and then if you want the kanji, hit the spacebar until the correct character conversion comes up.

Another option is to just copy/paste Japanese text from another document or web site, if you can find the characters you're looking for.