int64.org

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!

Related Posts

• Vi­sual Stu­dio in­com­pat­i­bil­i­ties on Sep­tem­ber 10, 2008 in Mi­crosoft, Win­dows Mo­bile
• 68th An­nual Nisei Week has begun! on Au­gust 18, 2008 in Japan­ese
• Nabe shuts down, in comes Shabu Shabuyo on Jan­u­ary 29, 2009 in Japan­ese
• More on Japan­ese in Win­dows on Sep­tem­ber 29, 2008 in Japan­ese, Mi­crosoft
• Odd new ramen place in Lit­tle Tokyo on Jan­u­ary 17, 2009 in Japan­ese