Can you read my Japanese?

In preparation for a call to a Japanese client, we’ve had the opportunity to implement a template that really puts in evidence Xpertdoc exceptional support for international character sets.

At first we thought we would have to install the Japanese versions of Windows Vista and Microsoft Office, but it turns out that Office 20007 already supports this language (this test was done using Microsoft Office 2007 Professional with SP1).

1.
We started with a Japanese template taken from the Microsoft Office web site (Office.Microsoft.com).

2.
We then streamlined the content and turned it into an Xpertdoc template using our custom Ribbon.

3.
Next we added some basic Xpertdoc tags for looping 10 times, inserting an employee name and a date field.
At this point we had a working template with English-labeled tags, outputting a Japanese newsletter merged with English fields.

4.
Turned out that Microsoft DotNet (and hence Xpertdoc Studio) supports Unicode Japanese character, so outputting employee name in Japanese was as simple as asking Alta Vista’s Babel Fish (babelfish.altavista.com) to provide us a suitable translation for “John Smith”.

5.
Outputting the date in Japanese was even simpler thanks to Xpertdoc’s support for international formatting. We just set the field’s format type to “Date” and its “Culture” to Japanese (Japan).

6.
Now that the outputted document was fully “Japanified”, we needed to do the same with the template itself.
In the next release of Xpertdoc (to be released in February 2008), we’ve added the ability to specify the caption of Xpertdoc fields in multiple languages including, you guessed it, in Japanese.
We simply switched the template language to “Japanese” and inputted Babel Fish supplied translations for all the fields’ captions.
What’s neat about this is that we can work with the client on the same template, switching the tags’ labels back and forth to our respective language without affecting the template’s functionality.

Here are screen captures of the resulting template and document:

ありがとう!