Opening Japanese Subtitle Files for Conversion to Text

[heroin_e]

Hello there, hopefully this is the right place to post this!

I found Japanese subtitles for Tiger and Dragon through another post somewhere in d-addicts and I wanted to be able to print them out for language study, so I've tried to open the idx/sub files in Wordpad (after changing the language on my computer to Japanese, of course), but it still comes up as a bunch of unintelligible characters with occasional clusters of kanji that don't make any sense. It claims to be the Shift+JIS format but proper text doesn't show up. Has anyone else had this problem before? How do you get around it?

Thanks for reading!

[occultangle]

Well, I am not the best expert on this but...

First, it shouldn't matter whether your computer is set to Japanese, that only deals with running programs, like games and such, that are in Japanese and don't support unicode.

As a general rule, I would open it in Notepad instead of Wordpad and if you have problems try "saving as" and save it as various types of unicode and/or japanese encodings until something works, but it usually shouldn't be that much of a problem.

Which brings me to what I think the problem really is; I don't think .idx or .sub are text type sub formats, I think they may be visual type subs, and if that's the case then wordpad/notepad isn't going to be able to display them. If you have the program SubtitleWorkshop (if not just google it, it's free) try loading the subtitles with that, and then save as "sub rip" (.srt), that may help.

[heroin_e]

That didn't work either, but thanks anyway! Eventually wound up investing in a secondhand copy of the script itself on amazon anyway.