Yes you can. See the picture below. However there're few things to consider.
By default when processing uses windows it uses fixed width font "Courier New". This font DOES NOT have Japanese characters included. It is
mostly designed for european alphabets
(like Norwegian æå, Spanish ñíá , and even Russian: русские буквы. A
nd FEW other alphabets (like arabic). This is why this font won't render Japanse/Kanji. And you will get something like this:
In order to make it work, you need to choose font which supports kanji. On my Windows7 it is for example "Arial Unicode MS Regular" (I guess this font is not available on Windows until you install this "Japanese Language Pack" or whatever it is called. But I am not sure about this one.).
So to set up this font as your "PDE font" you have to open
preferences.txt go to menu of
PDE // File // Preferences
Click click on the link to
preferences.txt and it will be opened in Notepad by default. Before editing preferences.txt make sure you close PDE (all instances of PDE). Then change your font as shown in highlighted line. Be sure that you type the name of the font exactly as it appears in the Fonts folder with all spaces, capital letters and all words of the font. After that save file and start processing. The new font should be in effect.
If you're looking to figure out which fonts on your system support Japanes/Kanji, there're few ways to investigate it:
The easiest way to figure out whether your particular font supports japanese(kanji/chinese) characters is to look at the size of the font file in the Fonts folder. On Windows open Control Panel // Fonts and choose from menu View // Details lisitng. Then you may want to right click on the title of the column title (ie "Name") and choose "Size", so that size appears in the listing. You should get something like the listing below
I sorted fonts by size (from large to small) and you can see that largest fonts are ranging in size from 48mb to 11mb. If files are so big, then usually they contain asian characters. And it makes sense b
ecase there're somewhat 50 000 characters in kanji, and font-file has to contain the shapes and other data for all 50 000 characters. That's a lot of data. Wherease if you only want to have 26 latin alphabet letters (even with uppercase/lowercase letters and digits and punctuation characters it will still be below 100 characters. And accodingly font file size will be up to 500 times smaller (48 000 kb / 500 = 96Kb ) (For example font "2 Lines" from
http://www.dafont.com/2-lines.font only contains uppercase latin letters and it's size is only 10Kb)
You can see this difference between fonts when looking at "Arial" family of fonts available on windows:
The "Arial Rounded MT Bold" is only 45kb because it only has like 300 characters (letters, numbers, some fancy letters and mathematical symbols) (see below):
Whereas "Arial" is 3 395kb because it has also a lot of other characters: latin, greek, hebrew, russian even arabic. And all the information about characters should be multiplied by 9, because it has 9 font styles ("Bold" , "Italic" .. etc) .
So 3 395kb / 9 styles ~= 377 kb per each font-face (containing all the
"
latin, greek, hebrew, russian even arabic").
And now you can see that "Arial Unicode MS Regular" is 22 000 kb because it has to contain all 50 000 asian characters (or more if it includes korean/vietnamese and other asia-pacific alphabets).
Hope this helps to understand fonts better.
