Adding Chinese Keyboard Input Method by Group Policy

[kidtrebor]

Hi,

 

 

As part of a recent rollout of Windows 10 computers for my client I was asked to include additional keyboards. I did this through group policy user preferences registry keys by adding a new key for each keyboard identifier; for example, 0000040c for French AZERTY keyboard layout. So far so good and I was able to deploy 8 keyboards.

 

There is a 9th keyboard that's in the group policy though - Chinese (Simplified), which I'd also like to deploy, but which isn't selectable from the list of keyboards. It seems like the reason for this is because Windows treats east Asian characters differently from others and the necessary input method editor isn't installed by default, but the only way I can see to set that up is by adding a Chinese keyboard, negating the need for the policy in the first place.

 

I'd like to be able to make this keyboard selectable without end-user input; I can't do it by hand myself because the end-users could log on to any of hundreds of machines in the client's company. I think Group Policy is the only way to achieve it - I tried to add it to the reference image but the config was lost during capture.

 

I'm not sure what else in Group Policy needs to be configured to make this work and wonder if anyone has any experience on this subject? I found this page on Spiceworks and tested importing the registry key - after looking it over I can at least discern that it references the Chinese (zh-CN: Microsoft Pinyin - Simple Fast) IME, but applying the key by the hand to a test computer doesn't achieve the desired result - I can only assume the how-to was relevant for Windows 7 but not 10, which seems, in both concept and execution, to think about keyboards differently than older versions of Windows.

 

My test machine is Window 10 64-bit Education (1909).

 

 

Regards,

Robert