[Freetype] Japanese text

[Chris Forno]

Perhaps this is not the right place to be asking this, but I've been searching 
for an answer for days, so...

How exactly can I go about setting up freetype to render Japanese characters 
(or characters from non-English languages, for that matter).  I have no problem 
rendering English text with C++/FreeType/SDL, but I'm unsure of how to approach 
Japanese text.

I'm able to load the font without problems, but I'm unsure of how to get 
C++/FreeType to recognize a string as Japanese text.  So far I'm only typing 
the text into my source file (which is getting saved in the EUC encoding) and 
prefixing it with L (which I guess makes it a wide string).  Then I use a 
basic_string<wchar_t> and an iterator to pass characters to FreeType.  The 
problem is that instead of taking a 16-bit character and looking it up, it 
takes 2 8-bit characters.

I know that I'm way off here and I really don't have a clue of how to do this 
correctly.  I've tried a combination of converting my source file to jis/sjis 
and setting the encoding to unicode and sjis with FT_Select_Charmap.  I haven't 
been able to figure out how to use FT_Set_Charmap yet since I don't know how to 
get a Charmap to send to it!

Anyway, I know this is a mess, but I would really appreciate any pointers to 
any information that can help me figure out how to do this.

By the way, I do not speak (much) Japanese and have very little experience with 
Japanese information processing outside of using a Japanese IRC client.

Thanks in advance for any help that you can provide.