CE-Star

L

LiAnCrow

秀才
CE-Star is really $%$#$% me off so I'm wondering if Pleco 2.0 will eliminate the need for this to be installed if I want to view and send Chinese SMS as well as view Chinese web pages. Please say yes, oh please say yes! If not I might just flash my rom to a Chinese version JUST so I don't have to install CE-Star. errrr....

Sorry for sounding so made...just really want my Touch to be able to read Chinese again. Funny thing is I can sometimes see Chinese on my Chinese SIP while Pleco 1.0 is open but this is inconsistent.

On a lighter note, great job on 2.0. Looking forward to its release!
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Unfortunately no, patching Windows Mobile like that is really really hard and we can't justify spending the resources on it when there are already other programs available that do the same thing as well as we'd be able to do it. (as the often-non-Windows-like behavior in the WM version of Pleco demonstrates, we're not exactly Windows experts; fortunately most of the tricky code in Pleco is platform-neutral, and because of its more advanced architecture Windows Mobile tends to run that code a lot better than Palm OS does)

You could, however, copy a whole text message and bring that up in Pleco's document reader if you wanted to at least be able to view it without CE-Star. Or if you install a Chinese font file on your system (like our ZYSong, which Pleco would still find if you moved it to \\Windows\Fonts), selecting that font in Word would let you view and edit Chinese text in Word without installing CE-Star, though in order to enter characters you'd need another system like ZTA4 (which unfortunately I think would only display characters as empty boxes without CE-Star or a Chinese-localized version of Windows, but it's not too difficult to make a guess about which character's coming up in which slot for common phrases anyway).

A far-off idea we're contemplating for Pleco 3.0 is some sort of SMS viewer/editor function built right into Pleco, integrating with Pocket Outlook / the phone's built-in SMS function; we'd need a better system for inputting characters with Pinyin in order to pull that off, but if we did a good job with it it could definitely be a killer app for expats in China/Taiwan (perhaps even one worth marketing as a standalone product).
 
L

ldolse

状元
I don't think it would be too hard to have an installer install the Pleco font to the windows directory and set the FontlinkMethods registry settings.... The only thing CE-Star does that's special is hack wince.nls to include Big5 and GB2312, but I think most users don't need that anyway - I certainly never need it, which is why I gave up on CE-Star a long time ago. That particular hack is one of the things that makes CE-Star flaky anyway, along with the fact that they have the anti-piracy stuff built in which just bloats things....

If I get a chance I'll do a proper write-up (sreenshots, etc) on how a user can set up Chinese support for free without CE-Star.....
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
But does that work in Internet Explorer (and IE-based applications like SMS)? My impression was that it didn't, at least not reliably, and that menus also are at best inconsistent. If there's a way to get all of that stuff working with just font linking we could certainly look at adding that as an option in our installer program, changing registry keys is extremely easy.
 
L

ldolse

状元
The fontlink registry setting works flawlessly throughout the system. The only thing that won't work is GB2312 and BIG5 encoded web pages, UTF-8 pages are no problem. SMS is hugely dependent on the carrier though - non-ascii SMS gets trashed by most non-asian carriers. I use China Mobile and a Malaysian carrier most of the time, and SMS works just fine, as does email, etc.

All I use is the fontlink registry settings myself, works flawlessly with every application I need to use. Pleco 1.0 has some weird behavior in it where occasionally it chooses its' installed font vs. the windows font, but that is only obvious for really rare characters like some of the weirder variants in the radical dictionary I posted on the flashcard forum.

The weird bug between Pleco 1.0 and IE that caused chinese characters not to be displayed elsewhere while Pleco was active may have made this less obvious in testing you may have done in the past..... That was a function of 1.0 being active though, it didn't have anything to do with the Fontlink registry.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Interesting - perhaps it's been improved since WM2003 or whenever we last tried to get it working. Anyway we'll play around with it and see if we can come up with something reliable enough to officially support.
 
L

LiAnCrow

秀才
Hm, maybe I'll just flash my ROM to a Chinese ROM. Should be good practice too! Keep up the good work with 2.0!
 
L

ldolse

状元
Sfrr - fontlinking is discussed on a bunch of boards - if you search for my posts you'll find a couple where I linked to the Microsoft pages that discuss it. In this case I'm setting the registry myself for whatever font I want. I use Total Commander to edit the registry, but there are other registry editors out there.

flameproof just posted a link to a thread for a sunglobe cab - I believe this sets the fontlinking up correctly for the sunglobe font, but I haven't tested, so I'm not certain:
http://www.trendsmobile.com/main/showse ... rentID=255
http://www.ppcsg.com/index.php?showtopic=92734
 
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