[postgis-users] double byte character

[Steffen Macke]

> In the case of shp2pgsql, I think the problem is the Shape format, is it 
> not? Can the DBF files store anything other than 8-bit character sets?

I think that Paul is right, the DBF format of the shapefile tables
might be the problem. I don't know about Japanese, but for Arabic, the 
following approach works:

"In order to display Arabic map labels, a PostGIS  database using 
UNICODE should be used. The labels should be TrueType labels with a 
UNICODE font that supports Arabic. Arabic shapefiles should be recoded 
with iconv from e.g. Windows-1256 to UTF-8 after running shp2pgsql. 
After recoding, the Arabic letters have to be shaped, e.g. with the 
iText Arabic shaper."

This short description is from the DCMMS Development Guide, available from

http://dcmms.sourceforge.net

Eventually the DCMMS application can provide some code snippets to help 
you with recoding/shaping of PostGIS data and the display of it using
Mapserver.

Steffen