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September 2008 Archives

More on Japanese in Windows

If you just ripped your Japan­ese music col­lec­tion only to find out Win­dows Ex­plorer can’t dis­play any of the tags, you prob­a­bly used ID3 v2.4. Win­dows does not sup­port 2.4—if you down­grade the files to ID3 v2.3, every­thing will dis­play just fine. A good tool that can do this en masse is Mp3­tag. This doesn’t only af­fect the UTF-8 fields: Win­dows won’t be able to read album art or any­thing else if you use v2.4.

Visual Studio incompatibilities

Hope­fully some­one read­ing this won’t have to waste a few days try­ing to fig­ure this stuff out:

If you in­stall Vi­sual Stu­dio 2008 Team Ex­plorer, you’ll want to in­stall it be­fore VS2008 SP1 or stuff will break.

In­ter­net Ex­plorer 8 Beta 2 breaks the Win­dows Mo­bile 6 SDK Re­fresh—try to click on Plat­forms in the pro­ject cre­ation wiz­ard, and it’ll can­cel the di­a­log. Unin­stalling IE8 (Con­trol Panel->Pro­grams->View in­stalled up­dates->Win­dows In­ter­net Ex­plorer) fixes the issue.

Adding Japanese support to Windows Mobile 6.1

The Win­dows Mo­bile 6.1 up­date just hit for my Black­jack II, and I’m lik­ing it quite a bit. One prob­lem, though, is that it seems to lack any Japan­ese fonts for the UI – every­thing shows up as those fa­mil­iar boxes. Here’s how to add the Meiryo font from Vista to your phone.

Caveat lec­tor: this in­volves mod­i­fy­ing the reg­istry on your phone. If you aren’t com­pletely con­fi­dent in your abil­i­ties with this, don’t do it. I’ve only done this on my AT&T Black­jack II run­ning the Win­dows Mo­bile 6.1 up­date. Phones are pretty damned ex­pen­sive, don’t blame me if you break yours!

You will need:

• Mo­bile Reg­istry Ed­i­tor
• Win­dows Mo­bile De­vice Cen­ter(6.1 or higher)

First you need to grab the font files from Vista, out of your Win­dows\Fonts dir. Ex­plorer doesn’t let you do this, so you can go via com­mand line or any other app with a Open File win­dow or some­thing sim­i­lar. You are look­ing for meiryo.​ttc and meiryob.​ttc. Once you’ve got these, copy them to your phone’s Win­dows\Fonts dir.

Next you’ll need to per­form some reg­istry edits on your phone. Open up Mo­bile Reg­istry Ed­i­tor and go to HKEY_LO­CAL_­MA­CHINE\Soft­ware\Mi­crosoft. Right click, and go to New->Reg­istry Key. Enter FontLink for the name. In­side of the FontLink key, add an­other key called Sys­tem­Link.

In­side the Sys­tem­Link key, right click and go to New->Multi-String Value. For the Value Name, enter Segoe Con­densed. For the Value Data, enter win­dows\fonts\meiryo.​ttc,Meiryo. To my knowl­edge Segoe Con­densed is the only font used in the UI on Win­dows Mo­bile 6.1, but you can re­peat this step re­plac­ing Segoe Con­densed with any fonts you want to add Japan­ese sup­port to.

Now go back to HKEY_LO­CAL_­MA­CHINE\Soft­ware\Mi­crosoft. Add a new key called Font­Path. In­side this key, right click and go to New->String Value. For Value Name, enter Font­Path. For Value Data, enter win­dows\fonts.

Now just re­boot the phone and it should have Japan­ese sup­port through­out the UI!