The ArcPad Team Blog

Unofficial stuff from the team behind the World's leading mobile GIS platform

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Chinese ArcPad on English Mobiles


This is a tweak to make ArcPad use a Chinese language pack on an English Windows Mobile device.

1. Run the ArcPad Deployment Manager
2. Install the latest build of ArcPad to your mobile device
3. Install a Chinese language pack for ArcPad (e.g. Hong Kong)
4. Locate the language pack DLL on your device, e.g. \Program Files\ArcPad\Locales\ZHH.dll
5. Rename it to ENA.dll
6. Run ArcPad
7. Go to the Locale tab
8. Click Show All Locales
9. Ensure that ENA is selected, i.e. English Australia
10. Click Ok
11. Close ArcPad

Now that you have modified ArcPad, you will need to get a Chinese font. I followed the steps on xda-developers' WM5_Tweak_Language_Chinese page which seem to do a decent job. On my Samsung Omnia i900 I was able to skip the first two steps because the Omnia already has the SC_Song font so I only needed to do the registry patches described in steps 3, 4 and 5.

You can also install a Chinese SIP (soft input panel) that allows you to input Simplified Chinese characters using either the stylus or Pin Yin. Steps on how to do this are also on the same website.