I recently tried installing Windows 7 on my mum's Lenovo F41A, but it was simply too old, so I switched to Windows Thin PC (tutorial here—huge thanks to its author; I love them for this!).
Windows Thin PC does not come with Chinese support, so you have to install it yourself. After installing the Chinese language pack, I ran into a problem in iTunes: the fonts looked decidedly strange.
This is caused by Windows font fallback. Windows Thin PC has an incomplete set of fonts: by default, it includes neither Microsoft YaHei and similar fonts nor the associated fallback settings. It only has what seems to be a 'No tofu' Unicode font. Unfortunately, about all that font manages is to avoid missing-character boxes. The font requested by iTunes does not contain Chinese characters, and the fallback process ends up falling back to the original font. The result is a distorted mess that is painful to look at.
With Google and my superb (ha, ha) English—I passed CET-4 by a whole ten points—I followed Microsoft's article and found the font fallback section of the registry:
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontLink\SystemLink
There are several registry entries here, one for each font.
According to Apple's article, the fonts used by iTunes should be 'Segoe UI Bold' and 'Segoe UI Regular' , so I changed the fallback settings for those two entries to match my working Windows 7 computer.
This fixed some of the distorted fonts in the UI, but the problem remained in lists and elsewhere. After half an hour of searching, I still could not find the exact name of the other font iTunes used.
So I exported all the fallback settings from the working computer and imported them into the target computer. Problem solved.
So, to make this easier for readers (though I wonder whether anyone will ever read this...), here are the steps:
- Export the entire following key from a working computer: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontLink\SystemLink
- Import it on the computer with the font fallback problem.