Does the Reader support ebooks in Russian or Greek?

:indian_ch

We don't know yet. I'll be trying russian RTF/PDF/TXT once I get mine. Also I can ask to try them Mobilereader who gets Reader first, I have nice zip package prepared already :)

Considering the manual mentions Bitstream Dutch and Swiss, support for either of the two languages with just the built-in fonts is unlikely. However, I suspect that both PDF BBeB with embedded fonts should work.

The Librie had no Russian or Greek fonts. My review of the source files posted by Sony for the Reader revealed no Russian or Greek fonts.

On the Librie you could embed Russian and Greek fonts into a BBeB ebook. PDF supports embedded fonts and I'd be simply amazed if the PDF viewer in the Reader didn't support this basic PDF feature. Indeed its lack would effectively hobble the Reader's ability to properly process many english language PDF files which often contain embedded fonts that lay outside the famous Postscript gang of 35.

I prepared following files so far
C:\>unzip -l russian_text_test.zip
Archive: russian_text_test.zip
Length Date Time Name
-------- ---- ---- ----
81487 09-27-06 15:21 russian.rtf
440441 09-27-06 15:24 russian_embeded_fonts.pdf
6176 09-27-06 15:25 russian_win1251.txt
261139 09-27-06 15:24 russian_without_fonts.pdf
5328 09-27-06 17:39 russian_win1251.lrf
-------- -------
794571 5 files

So all we need is a volunteer willing to test it :)

Slava, why don't you upload the files to the board. I promise we'll have faster test results ;)

>Slava, why don't you upload the files to the board. I promise we'll have faster test results ;)

Indeed, here is zip archive with Cyrillic text in RTF/TXT/PDF formats (Win1251 code page).

Thanks in advance to whoever can test them before I do :)

Slava, here's some info on what I think you will see. It's partially good news.

russian_embeded_fonts.pdf --

Will display the Russian. It's a little hard to predict (well, without experience anyway) how big or small something will look. Some light colors tend to show very light and may not be real readable, but yellow shading may be okay. I expect that the underline and strikethru are okay for you also.

russian_without_fonts.pdf -- Not sure. It might.

russian_win1251.txt/russian.rtf/BBeB -- these probably won't work for you

Bob, thank you for testing it! I can live with PDFs :)

One would expect that in an age of globalization (and partially - unicode), Sony would release reader capable of showing most of national character sets. Well, may be next one :)

Hey Slava,

when are you gettin' yours?

:crowngrin

Hey Slava, when are you gettin' yours? :crowngrin

as soon as FedEx SlowPost delivers it, which could happen on 10/04 (according to SonyStyle) :-)

Update: Delivery date just changed to 10/07 :rolleyes:

I am upset: no selecting encodings/Unicode in txt and rtf.
does anybody thing that a homebrew fix can do the trick?

>does anybody thing that a homebrew fix can do the trick?

Hopefully, someone will do that :)

I am upset: no selecting encodings/Unicode in txt and rtf.
does anybody thing that a homebrew fix can do the trick?

You need (a) a typeface that supports the relevant glyphs on the Reader. I leave it as a simple exercise to figure out what font file formats are supported and how to install the appropriate font, if there is space enough for it left.

You need (b) a rasterizer that does the rest. Font Fusion should do, unless it has been trimmed down in any way.

You need (c) a TXT/RTF reader that is capable of handling the wide characters and the particular encodings you want. Well, that, too, is just a SMOP, but I very much doubt that Sony has bothered to do it for this particular release.

Indeed, here is zip archive with Cyrillic text in RTF/TXT/PDF formats (Win1251 code page).

Librie supports any language (Russian, Greek, Polish, etc.) because its inner system is unicode (based on Iwata fonts). However to display properly the national letters, the local book charset has to be converted to utf-16 (no win1251, win1250, etc., utf-16 only). Probably the Sony Reader soft is designed in the same way.
Here is a small russian book encoded to utf-16, try it please in Sony Reader.
http://www.the-ebook.org/e107/e107_files/downloads/bd/Las-Vegas.lrf

VVV,

Nope this is coming out as all dashes and commas.

Thanks,
Jesse

VVV,
Nope this is coming out as all dashes and commas.

Let's try to understand what they did with unicodes. Here there are 5 short books in utf-16
http://www.the-ebook.org/e107/e107_files/downloads/bd/books.zip

Another Fine Myth.lrf - english
Le Horla.lrf - french (check please if there are the letters é, ù, ê)
Las-Vegas_img.lrf - russian, graphic book.
Las-Vegas.pdf - russian, pdf (the page size is not optimized for Reader)
Las-Vegas.lrf - russian (you already tried it)

Another Fine Myth work fine. It's in english anyways.
Le Horla seems to work fine, I think it's french. The e(dash), u(dash), a(carrot) and e(carrot) all appear fine
Las-Vegas_img read Russian fine, you can even change size. Title appears as blocks though.
Las-Vegas.pdf works fine (page size looks great on the reader).
Las-Vegas.rtf still doesn't work

Don't have a camera at the moment. The Las-Vegas_img.lrf is readable, but it looks blocky. The Las-Vegas.pdf however is excellent quality. How did you make that? What parameters what are you using as a PDF printer?

Another Fine Myth work fine. It's in english anyways.
Le Horla seems to work fine, I think it's french. The e(dash), u(dash), a(carrot) and e(carrot) all appear fine
Las-Vegas_img read Russian fine, you can even change size. Title appears as blocks though.
Las-Vegas.pdf works fine (page size looks great on the reader).
Las-Vegas.lrf still doesn't work

Well, as I can conclude from your experimental results, there are both good and bad points.

Bad: they cut off the full unicode support in lrf-files killing all the symbols higher than 255 :(. So, only the western-europe languages are supported in lrf books. But, on the other side, lrf-format is not very suitable for e-books, so it is not a big deal, and we will not cry :) .

Good. The multilang works in BookImage lrf (graphic files) and in pdf. For me it is enough, I am satisfied, I will bay Sony Reader.

The Las-Vegas.pdf however is excellent quality. How did you make that? What parameters what are you using as a PDF printer?

pdf was made with the iLiad module of my BookDesigner program, 90x120mm pdf page size. The BD update allowing one to assign the user-defined pdf page size will be avalible this week.
I do not think that 90x120mm is optimum for the Reader screen, it was just a quick estimation.

Does anyone know if it would be possible to download readable files on PRS-500 from sights like www.lib.ru? :rolleyes5

Does anyone know ... ? :rolleyes5

There is no direct support for Russian TXT/RTF files yet. You will need to open them in Word/WordPad and print to PDF with embedded fonts. Also, you will probably need to reformat files a bit first.

:uhoh2: There is no direct support for Russian TXT/RTF files yet. You will need to open them in Word/WordPad and print to PDF with embedded fonts. Also, you will probably need to reformat files a bit first.
Thank You for your input. Unfortunately I'm not much of a computer geek. What do You mean by embedded fonts & reformatting files, is there software that does it?

There is no direct support for Russian TXT/RTF files yet. You will need to open them in Word/WordPad and print to PDF with embedded fonts. Also, you will probably need to reformat files a bit first.

Hello!

So, did you finally test displaying of books in Russian on real device? Does it work?

http://www.the-ebook.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5913

I tried it this morning with using latest firmware, and all is ok :)

Enjoy :)

Worked like a charm!

Thanks boroda/igorsk et al.!

A strange observation:

Actually I wanted to polonize the reader - there are just 12 polish letters missing, so I thought that adding the other 200+ glyphs present in the image, would be a bit of an overkill. I took a minimalistic approach and just added the missing 12 letters to the original sony fonts. Now, with the 12 added letters, each of my fonts (modified with a trial version of Font Creator, to be exact), is a couple of Kbs smaller than the original. I wonder if there is no hidden reason why the originals were less space-effective - maybe they are somehow optimized for speed, or they are simply a bit messy :blink:

Is the Rusification outlined in the link above a replacement or an addtion of fonts (or something else entirely)? I don't read or speak Russian but I might want to try this with Greek fonts.