Reading Chinese Characters on Pocket PC Word Mobile?

M

mlim

Member
Hi all, hope this is an OK place to ask this question.

I just got a HP ipaq and am trying to read some MS word files with simplified Chinese characters (Chinesepod transcripts that I have cut and pasted into Word). I can read the files fine on my laptop Word, but on my Pocket PC I just get a bunch of squares. Is there an easy/free way to be able to solve this? I see some programs online (http://www.mobem.com/products/cestarwm5.php), but I'd like to not have to pay for this, and I don't need the input functionality. I have the fonts that PlectoDict uses and have no problem with Plecodict, just with Word.

The alternative is to just use PDFs, but these are large files and difficult to scroll through quickly.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It's possible, but a little tricky - it requires you to use a registry editor and a technique called "Font Linking." There's a free registry editor available here - install that to your Pocket PC, then follow these steps to get it working:

1) Quit PlecoDict, using the Quit command in the Dict menu.
2) In File Explorer, go to \\Program Files\PlecoDict and move the "SimSun" font file from there to \\Windows\. If SimSun isn't there, log on to "My Orders," download the paid-version PlecoDict installer, and select the SimSun font item in that to install it. Alternatively, if you go into c:\windows\fonts on your desktop, there may be a copy of SimSun in there which you can copy directly to your Pocket PC.
3) Open the registry editor, and navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\GDI key.
4) If there's a value listed in there called "FontLinkMethods", change its value to 1. If there isn't one, create a new REG_DWORD type value with that name and set its value to 1.
5) Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\FontLink\SystemLink - if FontLink and\or SystemLink don't exist, create new keys with those names.
6) Create a new REG_SZ value in there named "Tahoma" and set its value to this string: "\Windows\simsun.ttc,NSimSun".
7) Exit the registry editor, and soft reset your Pocket PC. When you go back into Pocket Word, the Chinese characters should appear; if they still don't, make sure you set the document's font to Tahoma and that should definitely get them to come up.
 
M

mlim

Member
Thx...interestingly, I messed around with my file a bit more, and have gotten the file to display correctly with Word Mobile, without having to do the registry stuff. Not sure how I did this, but I hope this continues to work!
 
S

sfrrr

状元
Mike--what exactly are you doing with these registry edits? It sounds like an easy way to get Word et al. to work without a Chinese IME program. Or do I misunderstand?

Also, I'm glad you still recommend Philippe Majerus' regedit program. It's been around for ages and is the stablest program of its kind. I'm a fan.

Sandra
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It's a lightly-documented feature in Windows CE that basically allows you to designate a font as a "backup" of another font - if the OS can't find a particular character in that font, it'll look for it in the backup. You can already get Chinese support in Pocket Word simply by installing a Chinese font file and selecting that font, but this lets you support Chinese with any font, useful in other applications that don't let you specify the font (or in Word if you want inline English text to look better).

And yeah, big fan of that registry editor, for me it's the Pocket PC equivalent of the similarly-useful free Palm application FileZ.
 
S

ssaito

探花
It worked, but it raised a few more questions...

Hi Mike, I use pleco religiously on my zire 71, and I just got a dell axim and will probably get the complete for that as well.

I have Windows Mobile 2003 SE on my Axim X30, but I haven't been able to see any chinese characters, until I tried your recommendation below. Interestingly, I was still not able to read a Chinese word doc (I tried the font labeled 宋体 in Word), but when I resaved the file in MingLiu and tried again it worked. Would you know what the difference in those two fonts is? My desktop Word does not seem to have SimSum as a font, though it seems to be compatible with MingLiu.

A nice side effect was that I can now read Chinese using Mobipocket reader. Very exciting.

A few follow-on questions:

1. Is the standard way to install fonts to drop them into the \windows\ directory, or the \windows\fonts\ directory? I've tried that before without the reg edits and had not luck. But I didn't do the soft-reset. Could that have been the problem?

2. Would you have any thoughts on having the path in the registry point to the original location of the SimSum font file, so that there would not need to be redundant copies? Also, would it be possible to store the font on the storage card? You've probably heard of the FileOnStorage shareware that supposedly lets you move fonts onto the SD card. (I never got it to work)

3. Would you have any thoughts on getting Pocket Explorer to recognize the Chinese fonts? Your registry backup font technique doesn't seem to work there (I tried the joyo.com site and found gibberish). The default character set pulldown doesn't seem to have any of the Chinese character sets uploaded.

4. Would you have any similar advice for doing the same Palm OS?

So, thanks for the great advice!

One product idea for you may be capturing your registry edits into a little executable. So PlecoDict could become a general "chinese-enabler" for the WinMobile platform.

I think others may have also posted about being able to copy-paste from external docs, so I suppose that's on the pleco roadmap as well.

(btw, is pleco located in soho/chinatown? I used to work in silicon alley, just north of canal for a small javashop. if you're in that area, i'm quite jealous. it was fun eating $4 noodles every day for lunch.) :D[/b]
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
"Songti" actually is SimSun; that's just its Chinese name. I'm not sure why MingLiU would work but SimSun wouldn't, the two fonts support an almost identical range of characters; perhaps Word just refuses to believe that SimSun supports traditional characters.

Re your other questions:

1) Both directories are considered acceptable locations for fonts; \Windows\ is mostly used for built-in (ROM-based) fonts, but fonts should load quite happily in either directory.

2) I don't think this would work, unfortunately, since Windows wouldn't look in any other directory on its own; you'd have to start up PlecoDict in order to get the font to actually load. You don't need to keep a copy of it in \Program Files\PlecoDict, though; if Windows loads it then PlecoDict will happily use that copy and won't insist on loading its own.

3) Pocket IE's text encoding support is a borderline disaster; I don't really know of any way to get that working well without using CE-Star or something similar (and even then it's less-than-perfect). You could try a better-designed browser like Opera or NetFront, though.

4) Again, you'd need a Chinese enabler of some sort - Palm OS doesn't support Unicode, so there's just no good built-in mechanism for using multilingual fonts.

We've thought about adding these registry edits in ourselves, the problem is that they don't always work reliably and untangling all the potential problems with them would be a tech support nightmare. External copy-paste should already work if the place you're copying from / pasting to uses standard Pocket PC text handling routines - what happens when you try to use it?

And Pleco isn't actually located anywhere - most of the work that isn't done by me is done by contractors and they're all over the place (in China in several cases). But if our sales keep growing at their current rate for another year or so we should finally be able to set up a permanent office, and it probably would be somewhere near Chinatown. I personally am located a bit north of there, in the West Village, so instead of $4 noodles it's $3 hot dogs (or $20 sushi).
 
S

ssaito

探花
registry fix for windows mobile - works for cingular 8825

Would anyone have a positive experience implementing Mike's cool registry change to allow Chinese fonts on windows mobile on the Cingular 8125? (thinking of getting it)
Thanks,
Steve
 
S

ssaito

探花
Mike,

I read on another posting in this forum that many of your users buy their first PDAs to use Plectodict, and many of their purchase decisions are based on your or this forum's recommendations.

If that is the case, would it be worthwhile recommending pda's with the Chinese version of windows mobile? That way people would avoid the shortcomings of english-only wm2003 and wm5.

Do users have experience using Plectodict on the chinese versions of windows mobile?

Steve
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well it might get around the issues with inputting Chinese text in other applications, but a great many of our customers are early on in their Chinese studies and wouldn't really be comfortable using a Chinese-localized Pocket PC interface. So I don't think it would be a good idea to recommend them. They should work, though - we've got a number of other customers using them without complaints, and having Chinese fonts built into the ROM would certainly save some storage space.
 
S

ssaito

探花
intermediate users

mikelove said:
we've got a number of other customers using them without complaints, and having Chinese fonts built into the ROM would certainly save some storage space.
Click to expand...

It might be useful to add to the instruction/help pages for people who are intermediate - just thought.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I don't know, sometimes that can have unintended consequences - people don't always read these things very closely and we get a LOT of e-mails from people asking if our software will work on an English-language Pocket PC, I'd hate for someone to decide they can't use our software because they mis-read the help pages.
 
J

jorritchie

Member
Does this method of tweaking the registry work? Are there potential disasters I should be cognizant of before proceeding?

I have an HP iPaq 2400, which displays Plecodict just fine, but when I go on the internet I get the little boxes instead of hanzi.

Thanks for any feedback!
 
L

ldolse

状元
Tweaking the registry works fine. You aren't in much danger of screwing things up if you only change the keys mentioned in the various fontlinkmethods tutorials. Worst case is your PDA still won't display Chinese because you didn't get the syntax right. There are a couple cab files floating around the net which will do this automatically for you, sunglobe.cab is one I believe. For myself I do it manually with Sun-ExtA, as it's the most complete unicode font around.
 
J

jorritchie

Member
At the risk of sounding as ignorant as I am, will either of these items display hanzi in IE Explorer? I am still getting little blocks instead of characters when I connect to the net. Pleco works fine.
 
L

ldolse

状元
@jorritchie,
The fontlinking tutorials will only work in IE for web pages that are encoded in Unicode. A lot of mainland chinese pages use a different encoding, GB2312. Some Hong Kong and Taiwan pages use their own local encodings. If you want to display these types of web pages you need CE-Star or a chinese ROM.

@ianb,

All the stuff on topic applies just fine to WinMo 6.1 on any hardware.
 
I

ianb

秀才
Hi, Ive tried the reg edit program but it wont install

It says " there is a problem with this windows installer package. A program required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personel or package vendor"

Im running vista and Win Mo 6.1

Any ideas ?

Now I have both TouchPal and CE Star installed, and that works, But it seems like a waste to have both installed.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Which version of it did you download? Try downloading the second item from the top of the list, "Pocket PC 2002,2003" - copy that file to your handheld and launch it in File Explorer to install the software. (works fine on our test models here at least)

Another registry editor is Resco Explorer - it's a paid, commercial product (and a very useful one) but there's a 7-day free trial version available.
 
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