prob a dumb question - empty squares for characters?

[agentasian]

i'm a new user. i just purchased the pocketpc full package.

i seem to be getting empty squares in places where there may be both chinese and english characters.

i've noted in particular that the " ǐ " character gets it.

i am using an HP h4150 with Pocket PC 2003.

 

[mikelove]

Did you remove your Pocket PC's SD or CF card recently? It sounds like the PlecoPinyin font file has disappeared; the usual explanation for that is that the SD card with the font on it was removed and Windows failed to find it when the card was reinserted.

If you soft reset your Pocket PC and restart PlecoDict, the characters should appear correctly. If the problem repeats, go into the PlecoDict installation folder and cut-and-paste the PlecoPinyin.ttf and simsun.ttf font files from there to your \\Windows\Fonts folder; then, soft reset your Pocket PC again and the software should run smoothly after that.

 

[gsiebengartner]

Empty squares in IE, other Pocket PC apps

Hello, My PlecoDict software works perfectly - I have the whole thing installed on the device, not on the SD card.

However, since Pleco was installed, other applications are having font problems. For instance, Pocket Internet Explorer can't display fonts. Instead, it displays an empty square (" ǐ ") for each character.

Any suggestions? I have already moved SimSun and the Pinyin fonts into the Windows/Fonts folder.

Thank you!

 

[mikelove]

We've gotten a few other reports of this - it appears to be a bug in the Pocket PC OS rather than a bug in our software, so unfortunately there's not a lot we can do about it until 2.0. Essentially, when one program starts using a Chinese font the OS assumes that other programs want to use Chinese as well, which leads to all sorts of problems when those other programs try to display non-Chinese text. In 2.0 we're going to write our very own font/text handling system which will completely circumvent Microsoft's (as we've already done in PlecoDict on Palm OS), so at that point our use of Chinese should no longer have any impact on other programs.

Effective workarounds for this problem seem to vary, but two things you might want to try are completely exiting PlecoDict (with the Quit command in the Dict menu) and/or soft resetting your Pocket PC before using one of the affected programs, and going into Pocket IE's settings screen and making sure that Western European is selected as its default language.

 

[daniu]

Hi!

Gotta come back to this again ... To me the problem's solution cannot be to start the PDA once more but rather to enable the Chinese Font to also be able to display Western letters. Would that be possible in any way? Using a big Unicode Font for IE? How to change the used font anyways? Currently I have the problem, that my PDA does not show Western characters at all - not even directly after startup. That is probably due to the fact that I got Monster Chinese/SIP which shows the date in the form: 2008年3月4日 I like that and also I cannot believe that there is no other solution but to restart the PDA every time between showing Chinese and Western texts ...

I gotta make clear here however that the problem has nothing to do with PD but I do believe that this Forum is a good place to discuss it. Maybe the topic should be moved to another place within the Forum but I guess there are not many Forums where people hang around with this problem (either ppl. use a Chinese PDA or they do not use Chinese - normally ...)

So - any suggestions about that? Anybody found a solution?

best regards
Daniel

 

[mikelove]

Actually it is a Pleco problem, it's a conflict with the way we load font files, but if you follow that earlier advice I posted about always exiting Pleco before opening any other application (or opening IE/Messaging/etc immediately after you soft reset and before you launch Pleco for the first time) that should get non-Chinese characters to display correctly. This is definitely fixed by 2.0, too.

 

[daniu]

Hi!

Sorry, but as I said before I do have that problem even without using PD - straight after a Softreset. Maybe Monster Chinese uses the same way to load fonts. I will do some further tests with this later today (deleting the IE cache etc.)

best regards
Daniel

 

[mikelove]

Sorry I didn't notice that earlier comment. Did you put Pleco's Pinyin font files in your \\Windows\Fonts folder by any chance? (or just \\Windows folder) If so, try removing those and that should clear this up - those fonts should only be loaded by Pleco and can cause problems if any other program tries to use them.

 

[daniu]

Hi!

That might well be the issue. However I seem to be unable to erase those files from the folder ... I tried already: to turn of the date on the today screen (as mentioed above there are some chinese characters there) and I even tried moving all files from Windows/AutoStart to somewhere but even after restarting the PDA with this I was not able to erase the files. Now I tried an entry in the registry but could not find one either. Now I really wonder: who is using that file? Any further idea? How can I manage to delete them? After playing around with regional settings my chinese characters in Today are gone (somehow cannot get that back) but still I cannot delete these two files.

best regards
Daniel

 

[mikelove]

Unfortunately it sounds like Windows is loading those fonts at startup. Sorry about that, we should really put in a warning about not moving those fonts... You might be able to delete them from your PC via ActiveSync; connect your Pocket PC to your desktop, open up your \\Windows\Fonts folder from there, change the file extension on each of those fonts (to .bin or something else non-font-related), then try deleting them. If that won't work then unfortunately you may have to back up everything and hard reset your Pocket PC in order to get rid of them.

 

[daniu]

Hi!

Wao ... it worked - I got my characters back in IE

I'd never thought that but it really works: renaming, then gotta restart and than you can actually delete those files. I do not get that at all - this is not Windows style (I'd never thought that you can rename a file that you cannot delete ...)

Thanks. Yeah - a warning would be good. I just thought it might increase the speed if I put the files on the PDA itsself. However I still had a copy in both PD folders.

And I even somehow managed to get the cool date format back (despite german region settings ...) Don't ask me how

best regards
Daniel

 

[mikelove]

Well Windows CE isn't exactly Windows - anyway glad to hear that that cleared it up. Warnings-wise, since we're now using our own font system and hence can load font data from any file we want we'll probably just rename those fonts to something other than .ttfs in 2.0 - pick a random extension (like .cpf for Cool Pleco Font) and that way if someone accidentally copies them to their \\Windows\Fonts directory it won't matter since Windows won't load a font if it doesn't recognize the extension.