how to use unicode font with palringo for linux (wine)

Palringo is a chat application that is famous for its mobile phone support.  I have heard it is an application that somehow tries to help non-BB users to fulfil the need for BBM-like application which is only for BlackBerry users.  To name a few of such prominent features:

• ability to send voice clips
• ability to do group chats (via chat rooms)

It also supports other basic functionalities such as:

• text chatting
• sharing photos
• supporting of various chat protocols e.g. palringo (default), msn, google talk, icq, facebook (jabber), and etc

Desktop platforms that it supports are WIndows, MacOSX and Linux (wine).  Mobile platforms that it supports are Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian and WIndows Mobile.

For Windows version and MacOSX version, they run natively on the operation systems.  But for Linux, which has a third-class support from Palringo, we have to run it on wine.  wine is a cool application / platform that lets us run a number of Windows-based applications on Linux.  I don't have enough experience with wine to tell you pros and cons about it.  However, I can notice that some times it can be sluggish.

Now, let's come back to the topic of this post.  I have no idea which fonts are pre-installed with wine and Palringo (wine version).  But it does not support, at least, Thai characters by default.  All Thai characters I typed or received were displayed as squares.  I did some research on Google and found that Palringo (wine version) uses Tahoma font by default.  However, the Tahoma font come with Palringo installation does not support unicode character.  (Again, I don't have knowledge about fonts so I can't actually confirm this.)  In order to make it works, basically, I needed to copy Tahoma fonts from Windows which are:

• tahomabd.TTF
• TAHOMA.TTF

which can be found in (WIndows) c:\windows\fonts\ directory, and paste them in (Linux):

/home/unsigned_nerd/.wine/drive_c/windows/Fonts/

After that I restarted Palringo and it just works.