Nanapho

Did you know about the difference of Kanji characters between China and Japan ?

Shinobu Takahashi, Developer Evangelist of Microsoft Japan, has posted that how to make your app Kanji-friendly adding one line.

As the picture below shows, there are some differences between Chinese and Japanese Kanji characters. While they are relatively little for those who are familiar with English or European languages, Japanese users cannot get awesome experience from Chinese font.

The character shown in the picture is ‘忍’, first character of ‘Ninja’ in Kanji. Unfortunately, Windows Phone runtime uses Chinese font to draw Kanji characters if you do nothing. But the Mango champ in Japan found an easy way to solve this. Add the following code in your constructor of App.xaml.cs.

using System.Globalization;
using System.Windows.Markup;

public partial class App : Application
{
        :
    public App()
    {
            :
        RootFrame.Language = XmlLanguage.GetLanguage(CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture.Name);
    }
}

If you do this, your app will draw Kanji characters using Yu Gothic Japanese font on the phone configured with ‘Japanese’ display language. It has no impact in English and Chinese environment.

I believe this is one of the most effective ways to make your app pinworthy in Japanese market. It’s already implemented in some of popular apps in Japan including Evernote.

Source: The Blog of Shinobu Takahashi