The Cunning Coder Blog

Continuing along with my last post about trying to get Ichitaro to work I was really happy when AppLocale allowed me to use the application. But I noticed a new annoyance. Though I could manually start the application just fine, this doesn’t make sense for a document viewer. Most of the time you want to just double click the document and have it open, you don’t want to open the viewer, File -> Open and browse to the file you want to view. Though AppLocale will allow you create a desktop shortcut to open the program, it can ONLY be called on programs. I needed to find a way to make it behave slightly more normally.

After searching through the registry for a while I found the key responsible for the open command used for TaroView Documents. I’ll copy paste the relevant key below. Note, this requires that you have AppLocale and the Ichitaro Viewer installed in their default locations and this key was exported on Windows 7 professional.  Modifying the registry is potentially dangerous and I take no responsibility for the results of choosing to modify your own registry.  It will still nag you telling you that this is a “temporary” solution, but you can find a patched version of AppLoc.exe if you really want to get rid of that.

Below is the exported key that solved my problems.  It  will open anything that is registered as a TaroViewDocument to open through the AppLocale’d version instead of the default one.  I hope this helps someone else who was as frustrated as I was:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TaroViewDocumentFile\Shell\Open\command]@="\"C:\\Windows\\AppPatch\\AppLoc.exe\" \"C:\\Program Files\\JustSystems\\TaroView\\TAROVIEW.EXE\" \"%1\" \"/L0411\" "

Ichitaro doesn’t like running on English Windows. I’m sure this is the same for virtually every other non-Japanese language setting but I finally had enough. I wanted to be finally be able to use MY computer to open the Ichitaro files I sometimes received from teachers and I was determined to get it to work.

I found that if I switched the non-Unicode language setting in Windows to Japanese it would work. Yay! BUT… This is a system wide change. No any non-Unicode program I have things it should be Japanese and that also messes with the display of certain things like the command prompt (which will use a Yen sign instead of a \). I could change it back when I was done, but each time you alter this system setting it requires a reboot. There must be a better way, I thought.

It turns out there IS a better way, but it’s still not perfect. There’s a program called Microsoft AppLocale (http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/tools/apploc.mspx). This application will let you point it to an EXE and pick the language it should run it. It even will let you make a shortcut to always run the application through AppLocale. No reboots, not side effects. The only annoyance is that it doesn’t install properly under Windows 7 (You need to tell it to use backwards compatibility) and it will prompt you even when using a shortcut to remind you that AppLocale is just a “temporary solution”. Hopefully it’s right, and Microsoft will release a more robust system level update that will allow it to handle such situations on its own, or software manufacturers will start releasing software in Unicode.