Arabic support in Duokan/Duokan Lite?

[Doitsu]

I'm interested in Arabic epubs and wanted to give Duokan a try after both CoolReader and FBKindle failed. But so far I was unsuccessful in installing Duokan Lite on my Kindle 3.3 system.
Before I do a factory reset, I'd appreciate it if someone who has either Duokan or Duokan Lite installed could open my epub and test the rendering of the Arabic text for me.

The first two lines should read:

Arabic pangram

نص حكيم له سر قاطع وذو شأن عظيم مكتوب على ثوب أخضر ومغلف بجلد أزرق

(The Arabic text is one of the Arabic equivalents of "The quick brown fox...")

If you see question marks or disjointed letters, it means that Arabic is not supported.

[thomass]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

I'm interested in Arabic epubs and wanted to give Duokan a try after both CoolReader and FBKindle failed. But so far I was unsuccessful in installing Duokan Lite on my Kindle 3.3 system.
Before I do a factory reset, I'd appreciate it if someone who has either Duokan or Duokan Lite installed could open my epub and test the rendering of the Arabic text for me.

The first two lines should read:

Arabic pangram

نص حكيم له سر قاطع وذو شأن عظيم مكتوب على ثوب أخضر ومغلف بجلد أزرق

(The Arabic text is one of the Arabic equivalents of "The quick brown fox...")

If you see question marks or disjointed letters, it means that Arabic is not supported.

I used traditional arabic font and DLite displayed it correctly

[Doitsu]

Thanks for your quick test, thomass! I'll give Duokan Lite a try.

Originally Posted by thomass

I used traditional arabic font and DLite displayed it correctly

Actually, I embedded an Arabic font in the epub. Theoretically, an ePub reader should be able to display it without having to specify a font. ADE does, but doesn't do RTL and character shaping. I'll do some more tests once I get Duokan Lite running.

[bchaplin]

Please let me know if you do get it to work. I'd be interested in installing both Arabic and Hebrew fonts on my Kindle, if it's possible & if they could be resized like regular fonts. It surprises me a lot that we have to 'hack' the Kindle for this; it is a very mature platform at this point. On my little iPhone I can read or type in any alphabet I could possibly need.

[Matan]

How exactly did FBReader fail?

I tried this file and it displayed (to my untrained eye) exactly what you wanted. FBReader does not recognize the epub as Arabic, and thus displays it left aligned, but manually setting the language solves this issue. I don't know if the font used is from the epub, or a font installed on my system.

This might be a problem in your epub, since I have two Hebrew epubs, and FBReader does recognize their language as Hebrew.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Matan

How exactly did FBReader fail?

It did display Arabic letters, but they were displayed isolated and from left to right. I.e. it behaved exactly as ADE. (I did change the language to Arabic.)

BTW, I did my tests with Andy Wooden's fbKindle (FBReader 0.12.10)

Please find attached a screenshot that illustrates the problem. The letters should have looked like this:

نص حكيم له سر قاطع وذو شأن عظيم مكتوب على ثوب أخضر ومغلف بجلد أزرق

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by bchaplin

Please let me know if you do get it to work. I'd be interested in installing both Arabic and Hebrew fonts on my Kindle[...]

Hebrew seems to work, too. I just tested it with a Hebrew pangram. But since it has been ages since I last looked at a Hebrew text I'm not 100% sure.

Please find attached a simple Hebrew test .epub and a screen capture that shows the Kindle display.

BTW, my installation on a Kindle 3.3 WiFi went as follows:

1. I backed up all my Kindle ebooks and uninstalled the jailbreak
2. I downloaded Lite1014.1225.rtm.rar from here
3. I copied the DK_System folder from the archive to the Kindle root directory
4. I copied the large update_duokan_0b008.bin from the 升级包\k3升级包\kindle3.2.1升级包\ folder to the Kindle root directory (If you don't have a WiFi model, you'll have to pick one of the other .bin files.)
5. I started the firmware update (Settings > Update Your Kindle)
6. After the update was complete, Duokan Lite displayed the Chinese welcome screen. After a while I figured out that I had to select the 5th menu item [S] in the rightmost menu to change the language to English.
7. I connected the Kindle to the computer and copied Arial.ttf from my PC to the \DK_System\Lite\res\userfonts folder. (Arial supports both Arabic and Hebrew).

[bchaplin]

Doitsu, thank you for the step-by-step! I will try this.

[Matan]

This is how it looks on my kindle. If it is OK (please check), we can try to find out the difference between your and my setups.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Matan

This is how it looks on my kindle. If it is OK (please check), we can try to find out the difference between your and my setups.

The text in your screen capture looks exactly as it should be. Most likely we're using different software versions.

I downloaded fbKindle from here, because I assumed that this is the latest version.

If yours is more up-to-date or you're using a different version, please let me know where you downloaded it from and I'll re-test FBReader.

[Matan]

The font I use is arial.ttf. I copied it to the directory /mnt/us/fbKindle/qtKindle/lib/fonts, and selected family Arial in the Styles tab in Options dialog. Can you try to use the same font?

I use the same distribution of fbKindle, but I replaced the FBReader binary with one I compiled that fixes some line breaking issues in RTL texts. You can download it from here. The downloaded file FBReader should replace the file /mnt/us/fbKindle/FBReader .

[Doitsu]

I tested Matan's custom version and can confirm that it indeed displays Arabic correctly.

[RTL]

How about the Arabic with diactrics marks? Does it display correctly? Thanks.