Font substitutions in WinXP

I have a little big problem here after changing the Windows shell font to 'Lucida Grande', as described somewhere in this forum. Now I have a nice and cool menus and dialogs. Here a new problem arose.

Thai in Lucida Grande doesn't seem to work properly in Windows. So the system uses another font with an incredibly small font for Thai, and some haunting squares for god-knows-what language, as shown in the captured image below.

I think I need to add/edit something in Windows Registry but I am as blind as those three mice in the song.

For my case, I would like to use 'Arial Unicode MS' as my substitution for the scripts unbeknownst to Lucida Grande. Where do I have to look?

N.B. As I speak no Geekish, and English isn't even my second language, please bear with my babble.

#465904

Don't worry about your English, it's perfectly fine

As for your problem, my suggestion would be to turn the font in the registry back to the original value, and just use the Styler program (now free) to change fonts. That should hopefully solve it

#465966

Thanks for the Styler idea. I've tried and it seems to be easy to control, though it doesn't solve the Unicode font substitution problem as it doesn't have an option to change the system's unicode font substitution default. I think I'll try digging the registry again.

This will become a matter of a pure tweak for me. I don't think program developers encounter or envisage this kind of problem that often because the majority of users, although working under unicode environment, do not have to go as far as non-latin and non-cyrillic scripts.

[[uPDATE]]

/me is still wide-awake even it's already 5 a.m.

evilmnky204, man, I love you. That Styler gave me an idea.

This is what I do:

I tried digging in the registry again as you suggested. First I just wanted to see what's the difference between three different MS Shell Dlgs so I changed the font back in all of them from Lucida Grande to Arial Unicode MS.

Then I went to Flyakite, disabled the visual style feature back to the ugly normal Windows.

And rebooted.

Now back to the ugly Windows, everything turned into Arial Unicode MS, which is just fine for me. But I still want my Lucida Grande back in the places it should be. Oh greedy me.

Then I tried again with Flyakite, re·enabled the visual style and pressed Apply, with so much hope that it wouldn't screw up my shell fonts.

Now guess what... Tada!

The Thai font looks ten times more legible than the previous one. Icon and window text are now in Lucida Grande. Plus, Chinese, Japanese and some other jiggling special characters came back like magic.

Perhaps this could more-or-less be a useful guide for other Thais and Asian folks having the same problem.

Thanks evilmnky204 for poking my brain. Thanks Chris for your invention of grace. I love you all!

#466003