FeedBooks in Chinese 中文

[jessie102]

Recently, i found Chinese newsfeeds on Feedbooks. However, while the chinese appears properly in the Table of Contents, the articles end up as all question marks "????".

This occurs with PDF, SONY, and EPUB formats on my Sony PRS 505 with chinese flash mod, Acrobat 9.0 in Windows XP with Eastern Fonts, HTC Touch with NLS mod and MingLui font.

The following example of feeds should reproduce this problem:

Yahoo! 新聞
http://www.feedbooks.com/newspaper/112
defined with EN language

LinuxTOY
http://www.feedbooks.com/newspaper/1378
defined with ZH language

Is this problem just me? Have I installed the wrong fonts?
I am able to get other Chinese documents to work.

[Hadrien]

Concerning PDF files, it's a problem on our end (Feedbooks) since we haven't added a CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) font yet. ePub is different, as long as you have a font capable of displaying chinese on your device, it should work.

[jessie102]

this doesn't explain the why only the table of contents appear in Chinese. If the necessary fonts weren't available then wouldn't the TOC also fail to appear in Chinese?

Has anyone had success with feeds such as those listed above?

[Hadrien]

I don't think that the Sony UI and Adobe DE use the same font. This would explain why in one case you can see the font and in another you can't.

[jessie102]

appreciate the quick responses

In case this helps diagnose the problem, I will clarify that by "Table of Contents" I mean the Table of Contents inside the feed, not the booklist generated by the Sony reader.

I'm not sure Sony UI is responsible for handling the inner feedbook's Table of Contents inside the file.

In any case, an interesting note is that the same phenomenon where only the book's Table of Contents appears properly happens on Digital Editions in Windows XP with East Asian fonts enabled (inside Regional and Languages Options) and in Adobe Reader LE in Windows Mobile 6.1 with Chinese NLS with Ming Liu font.

And to clarify for example, the Windows XP with Digital Editions scenario, the Left Panel of DE displays the Table of Contents of the file properly (which suggests my computer has the necessary fonts), but each page containing the articles contain "????" characters.

The case directly above would appear to rule out the uncertainty of what program's handling the file. In this case, Digital Editions should be reading both the TOC and the articles.

I can't think of what else to install besides a Chinese Version of Windows XP if that even matters.

[Hadrien]

The Sony UI handle the Table of Contents of the ePub file: it's not in-line HTML but something rendered by the UI.
I use the exact same strings and characters for the elements in the TOC and the elements in the document itself by the way: aside from the font, I don't see where the problem could be.

Do you have any chinese font ? One option for ePub would be to embed the font in the file and specify it in the CSS. In this case, the text would most likely be displayed.

[jessie102]

again, thanks for the quick responses.

If you installed nothing more than the East Asian Fonts included with Windows XP and it works for you, I don't see why it shouldn't for me. I'll report back after testing on another computer to see if anything changes.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by jessie102

again, thanks for the quick responses.

If you installed nothing more than the East Asian Fonts included with Windows XP and it works for you, I don't see why it shouldn't for me. I'll report back after testing on another computer to see if anything changes.

I don't think that the problem is with the fonts installed on your desktop: the problem is with the default font that DE is using.

[Hadrien]

I've manually embedded a chinese font in one of those 2 files and it work. It proves my point: the default DE font cannot handle chinese, although the default font used in the TOC can handle chinese.

[jessie102]

looks like you found the problem. That file you created works for me. DE won't use the correct font unless it's embedded.

Since I don't have InDesign, but have Acrobat, I was tried to embed some fonts into the PDF format of Yahoo! 新聞, with Acrobat, using the Text Touch up tool, trying MingLiu, SimSun but to no avail.

Any idea how to fix such PDFs after they're already created by someone else?

[jessie102]

looks like there's a work around:

I downloaded the EPUB format then convert to LRF with Calibre. With this method, the unicode displays properly.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by jessie102

looks like you found the problem. That file you created works for me. DE won't use the correct font unless it's embedded.

Since I don't have InDesign, but have Acrobat, I was tried to embed some fonts into the PDF format of Yahoo! 新聞, with Acrobat, using the Text Touch up tool, trying MingLiu, SimSun but to no avail.

Any idea how to fix such PDFs after they're already created by someone else?

For the PDF files on Feedbooks, I'll add the CJK font to our to-do list. Once we have it, everything in chinese should work as far as the PDF output is concerned. For ePub, the problem is on the reading system side, rather than the format: you need a way to switch the default font to something else (embedding a 10Mb font in every file isn't exactly ideal).

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

For ePub, the problem is on the reading system side, rather than the format: you need a way to switch the default font to something else (embedding a 10Mb font in every file isn't exactly ideal).

A font can be specified in an ePub ebook without embedding it. I'm not sure what the best way to do this is (e.g. to allow the best fall back). In any case, this does not help if the font isn't available on the target device. So this may help for Adobe DE on a PC, but not on the PRS-505.

The MobiPocket version currently works best on a PC, because the MobiPocket Windows Reader uses a very complicated (and sometimes broken) font matching scheme to ensure that all requested characters can be displayed. This may again not transfer to handheld devices with limited font support (even MobiPocket's scheme can only work from available fonts).

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

A font can be specified in an ePub ebook without embedding it. I'm not sure what the best way to do this is (e.g. to allow the best fall back). In any case, this does not help if the font isn't available on the target device. So this may help for Adobe DE on a PC, but not on the PRS-505.

The MobiPocket version currently works best on a PC, because the MobiPocket Windows Reader uses a very complicated (and sometimes broken) font matching scheme to ensure that all requested characters can be displayed. This may again not transfer to handheld devices with limited font support (even MobiPocket's scheme can only work from available fonts).

Well in CSS you simply specify multiple fonts when you want some sort of fallback. I don't even think that this is necessary in this case though: just specify the font and if it's not available it'll use the default font.

[kitycat]

Maybe you can try Calibre, it supports Chinese RSS very well.
你可以可以试试 Calibre 啊， Calibre 对中文的支持很好啊。可以很方便的看RSS