There are four additional silkscreen buttons added to Japanese devices to control the FEP transliteration and conversion process. The four FEP buttons are positioned between the left-most silkscreen buttons and the Graffiti area, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

Four FEP buttons are added to the silkscreen area on Japanese Palm devices.

The functions of the FEP buttons are described on Palm's localized applications page as follows:

The top-most FEP button tells the FEP to attempt Kana-Kanji conversion on the inline text. The next button confirms the inline text and terminates the inline conversion session. The third button toggles the transliteration mode between Hiragana and Katakana. The last button toggles the FEP on and off.

According to the information provided, Japanese text entry is always done inline, meaning transliteration and conversion happen directly inside of a field. Events are passed to the FEP by the field code, which then returns information about the appropriate text to display.

It's recommended that to conserve screen space, whenever the string contains only Katakana characters you should use half-width Katakana characters on user interface elements such as buttons, menu items, labels, and pop-up lists. On the other hand, if the string contains a mix of Katakana and either Hiragana, Kanji, or Romaji, then you should use the full-width Katakana characters instead.

Conclusion
This should get you started thinking about the concept of localized applications. To really get a handle on the subject, be sure to pay a visit to the Palm manual on localized applications at http://oasis.palm.com/dev/kb/manuals/1747.cfm. It's just one of many valuable technical resources available as part of the Knowledge Base section of the Palm Developer Support area at http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/.

Steve Niles is Senior Editor for ZATZ Publishing. He is also an independent filmmaker and freelance writer. For more information, visit http://www.sn-films.com.