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I am using Wine to use a Windows interface to WeChat in Linux. WeChat is a popular messaging program in China, similar to WhatsApp.

Many of my messages are in Chinese. Unfortunately, they are not displayed properly. I think I don't have the font. Instead of Chinese characters, I just see squares.

How can I fix it? I am using Ubuntu Mate

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 18.10
Release:    18.10
Codename:   cosmic

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_IDE
innisfree
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    You need to install the fonts. Which distribution are you using ? CentOS ? Ubuntu ? – jayooin Jan 23 '19 at 06:45
  • Does your environment have Chinese fonts installed already ? Check with the command `locale` – jayooin Jan 23 '19 at 07:09
  • @jay thanks I added the information. I presumed I had to fix something on the wine/windows emulation side. Are you saying maybe I need to install the fonts on the linux side? – innisfree Jan 23 '19 at 07:43
  • Have a look at this answer https://askubuntu.com/questions/86335/installing-other-fonts-on-wine – Junme Jan 23 '19 at 08:16

1 Answers1

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I found a very good article about how to set up WeChat in Wine https://ferrolho.github.io/blog/2018-12-22/wechat-desktop-on-linux

Here are the essential parts of it in case it gets unavailable

Providing a Chinese font

For the Chinese characters to be rendered correctly we need to provide Wine with Chinese font. We will use winetricks for this, which is a helper script to download and install extra Wine stuff.

Download winetricks:

wget  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks

Set the executable flag:

chmod +x winetricks

Some winetricks “packages” require a few external tools to be installed. We need cabextract:

sudo apt install cabextract

And now we install the fonts and some other libraries:

./winetricks corefonts gdiplus riched20 riched30 wenquanyi

Finally, we need to edit regedit to enable the font we just installed. Download this .reg file.

Open regedit with the command:

./winetricks regedit

In the Menu bar, click Registry and select Import Registry File…

When the browser shows up, select the .reg file you have just downloaded.

We are now ready to install WeChat itself.

LVitya
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