How To Read Japanese on your Non-Japanese S60 Phone

So, I'm all excited that I got my new Nokia N75 this week, and I have to admit it. Had I never been to Japan I would never have been this into getting a new cell phone. Which is why, I suppose, it felt that the phone was somewhat incomplete until I could at LEAST read Japanese on my phone. I can live without being able to text in Japanese. I don't have that many people to text in Japanese anyway. But, I've been at it for the last several hours and I've found a nice neat and clean solution to the problem, because as it turns out the S60 OS has support for unicode fonts built in. So read on if you wish to know the details.

First of all you need Three things. You'll need Y-Browser a program which will allow you to manage files S60 normally hides from you, A Micro-SD card with at least about 30-40MB Free, and also a card reader so you can create files and folders on the card using your PC.

I would like to note that I had found this solution earlier published by Darla Mack who had posted it in regards to simply changing the font. However, I found her explanation slightly confusing and my install simply went slightly differently than she described so I thought I'd tell you how I did it in the context of displaying foreign characters on an American phone.

Anyhow, back to the point, this little hack is all made possible by the fact that it seems that by default S60 will load all of it's Resources from the micro-sd card first. Why? I don't know, maybe it was so that we could change the resources if we liked? Or maybe they just forgot to switch that off after release or maybe it's just meant as something which can be used in case the rom gets corrupted some how. I don't know the reason why but it seems it just works.

So, if you open up Y-Browser you'll see you've got some "drives" listed. In mine I had a C: , D: , E: and Z: drive. If you don't have your Micro-SD card in the phone you'll be without the E: drive. I don't know what D: is, but C: the built in writable memory of your phone. Z: is going to be the Read-Only Memory System Files. If you want to find the original system fonts for your S60 phone you'll find them in Z:/Resource/Fonts. Actually, this is the first step to actually replacing these fonts. We can't change the names of the fonts in the system so we need to copy the names of these font files.

When I looked in on my N75 on my phone I found the following in z:/resource/fonts :

nosnr60.ttf
nssb60.ttf
nstsb60.ttf
S60ZDIGI.ttf

All you have to do is take your favorite unicode font (with support for the language of your choice, in my case Japanese, and put them onto your memory card at E:/Resource/Fonts/

Note, Y-Browser didn't allow me to create the E:/Resource folder. As far as I can tell the name Resource is special and cannot be created or changed in any of the root directories, so we must do this step on our PC. Otherwise you might be able to get the OS to create the folder for you by installing a font to it or something, I haven't tried. It was just easier for me to create the folder on my PC.

So basically, plug your MicroSD card into your card reader on your PC. Create a folder called Resource and inside of it place another folder called Fonts.

Then, in the Fonts folder you add four copies of the font you want to use renamed to the same name as the fonts in the Z:/resource/fonts of your phone.

At first I had trouble finding a font which would look good with the size and resolution of the screen. So I was going to look into which font files were used with what text. However, while doing this I managed to find a font which I thought Looked pretty good. If you can get your hands on a copy of Microsoft's "MS PGothic.tff" it should do the trick and look pretty good in the process. I stole mine from my copy of MS Office on my Mac. You can steal it from the office->fonts folder.

After that, you should be able to happily read Japanese (or whatever language you want) on your phone.