Full metal alchemist kanji in latex code.

Question

I want to write 鋼の錬金術師 (aka "Alchemist of Steel") is latex. I have the CJK package but just a simple copy and paste of the above kanji to gvim does not do the trick. The code I have is

\begin{CJK*}[dnp]{JIS}{min}
Fullmetal Alchemist (鋼の錬金術師 Hagane no Renkinjutsushi, literally "Alchemist of Steel")
\end{CJK*}\end{document}

What I get is the error:

./preface.tex:56: Package CJK Error: Invalid character code.

I may have missed something vital though... Anyone has any idea?

Answer 1

It's probably an encoding problem. If I save the example in UTF-8 encoding changing it into

\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{min}
Fullmetal Alchemist (鋼の錬金術師 Hagane no Renkinjutsushi, literally "Alchemist of Steel")
\end{CJK}

I get correct output. Check the encoding used by gvim. However with

\newcommand{\japanesetext}[1]{\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{min}#1\end{CJK}}

in the preamble, typing the phrase as

Fullmetal Alchemist (\japanesetext{鋼の錬金術師} Hagane no Renkinjutsushi,
literally "Alchemist of Steel")

seems more practical.

Answer 2

Inputting Japanese is quite a pain, as far as I know.

Rather than a direct solution using CJK, I suggest, if you can, a way round, using platex:

\documentclass{article}  
\begin{document}  
Fullmetal Alchemist (鋼の錬金術師 Hagane no Renkinjutsushi, literally "Alchemist of Steel")  
\end{document}

and then platex foo.tex followed by dvipdf foo.dvi (or maybe dvipdfmx foo.dvi) if you need pdf output.

However, this might prove problematic if you use packages incompatible with platex.