[Fury]

I have a large bunch of files and folders which have mainly japanese characters in them and I need to preserve the names as they are. So I installed supplemental language support from regional and language options, which should install all the necessary fonts to display the file and folder names correctly. After a reboot the fonts are installed as I can type new text into text documents with these fonts, but file and folder names are still gibberish.

Root of the problem is that I need to convert these files of several formats into another format. But the converter won't work with those gibberish characters, I hope the problem would be solved after the file and folder names are displayed properly.

Help me out here will you, thanks.

[Kosh]

Is language support installed? If it is then it should work. Also maybe switching the encoding to Japanese will work.

[Fury]

I installed supplemental language support. Didn't try to change encoding because AFAIk that shouldn't make a difference, but I'll do that when I get home.

[Kosh]

You're right, it shouldn't make a difference, but then again it won't hurt to try.

[Prophet]

Fury, you should know that when dealing with windown everything is worth a try. All the way to turning your monitor clockwise and chanting in latin.

As a wotrhless statement I say that acoording to my experience, the files names should work after language support is installed. Just like common sense would dictate. Unless you have been screwed and the files and folders were already originally in gibberish.

[kode]

that's funny, because I can get japanese letters in file names showing up correctly, and the only thing I've done is to install the supplemental language support (for east asian languages, at least).

[Fury]

The names are correct when I view them in linux.

If you are positive that the names should be displayed correctly when language support is installed, then the problem more than likely is the ext2/3 driver for Windows. See, the files are located on an ext3 partition because FAT32 does not fully support unicode I think. And converting the files won't work in linux because the files are in non-supported proprietary file formats. Which is why I need to convert the files in the first place.

I guess I need to transfer a few files and folders to another linux computer, boot into Windows and download the stuff from the other computer. If Windows is still unable to read the names correctly or linux is unable to afterwards, I am ready to bang my head into a wall.

Edit: I'll just try FAT32 first though, it just might work after all...

[Col. Fishguts]

Can't you do a batch rename in linux and then do the conversion in windows ?
Or do the files need to keep the original names ?

[Fury]

I'd prefer to keep the original names. Although if FAT32 won't work, I think I'll rather rename the names than start transferring files between computers. But then I need to rename the names manually, batching in this case won't do the job.