a chinese student of mine reported that the text in the console is
unreadable when he does printlns. he's going to be around until feb 2010 if
you want me to test things on his machine.

edit]
the character encoding of the console seems to be wrong

hm, that ought to be an easy fix. can you send a screenshot of what it
looks like? (is it just a series of question marks or is it bizarre
character spew?) also, what platform is he on?

screenshot is in the attachment: strange characters not ??? marks. looks
like vista to me ... and thanks for looking into it

thanks, i think it's line 233 of EditorConsole.java:
message(new String(b, offset, length), err, false);

and that the default encoding for streams/files and the encoding for the
display are set differently for some reason.

is it a chinese windows install? or is he using chinese input methods with
a german windows install? (or vice versa, for that matter). i'm trying to
figure out what's out of joint.

also, please make sure he's using the latest version of p5 that *includes*
java (or has updated java on his machine to the very latest version of 1.6)
so that we're not chasing a ghost.