Kindle3 and Romanian language support

[drac]

Hi,

I've recently read that Kindle3 has new fonts http://bit.ly/dBTFbv, and I've wanted
to know the Romanian language support status.

Romanian language has five special characters
A-Breve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%82
A-Circumflex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%82
I-Circumflex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8E
T-Comma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C8%9A
S-Comma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C8%98

In order to do a quick test one needs to navigate to the following pages:

1. http://bit.ly/bF8EDL encoded as utf-8
2. http://bit.ly/b6YRTo encoded as iso-8859-16

My question is, can a Kindle3 owner do a quick test? A screenshot (or a picture) would also be appreciated, but not necessary.

Thank you in advance!

[masaki]

I will test those pages for you this evening or tomorrow..
Just an fyi, I've made mobi versions of Eminescu and Creanga from ro.wikisource.org encoded as UTF8 and they look fine on DXG..

[NiLuJe]

Originally Posted by drac

My question is, can a Kindle3 owner do a quick test?

Probably not, since it's not out until 8/27... .

But it works fine on a K1/2/DX/DXi/DXg with a fonts hack and a font with good Latin support. (Cf. Kindle dev subf, we've already discussed the Romanian case specifically, and it works.).

[drac]

Originally Posted by masaki

I will test those pages for you this evening or tomorrow..
Just an fyi, I've made mobi versions of Eminescu and Creanga from ro.wikisource.org encoded as UTF8 and they look fine on DXG..

Can you put those mobi files on Gutenberg project? The Romanian section has one book, and that book has little literary value. Amazon takes books from Gutenberg to deliver them freely. Right now there is only one Romanian Kindle book in Amazon's store, and it would be nice to have those books in Amazon's store.

The webpages I've linked above contain the proper Romanian S Comma Bellow and T Comma Bellow characters, I already know that Kindle can display the S Cedilla and T Cedilla characters, but I do not like those characters.

All my life I have read Romanian books with proper characters, and it would be silly to adapt to read books with improper characters. BTW I have reported this problem to Amazon

[drac]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

(Cf. Kindle dev subf, we've already discussed the Romanian case specifically, and it works.).

The fact that the Caecilia font family has 26/40 typefaces that can render ĂăÂâÎîȘșȚț gives me hopes that Kindle3 has finally proper Romanian language support (one month ago the situation was worse, but back then I haven't counted them)

[masaki]

Loaded the URLs in the kindle browser, do not look good in DXG with 2.5.5 firmware. Remains to be seen in K3. ă, ș and ț do not display properly in the first case, ș and ț in the second.

[newman]

Kindle browser really sucks when it comes to diacritics. When you try some MOBI files - should be good (Slavic languages looks not bad -- just "ť" and "ď" looks like a "t", or "d", with "ˇ" on top of them...).

[NiLuJe]

Depends on the font you're using. You can have good diatrics support in the browser. Like I said, we've already discussed this for the Romanian case, and it works fine in both books & browser, with a good font.

[tomsem]

There's a document called 'Unicode 5.1 Test Publication' which someone converted to ePub and which I converted to mobi. All of these Romanian characters display correctly on my K2. I also converted the sample referenced above and it looks fine.

But whether any given text works will depend on whether the unicode is properly normalized. "ă" can't be encoded, for example, using 'a' and the unicode combining mark for '˘'. Rather it should use the precomposed unicode character (in this example, Unicode 0103, or UTF8 C4 83). So Canonical equivalence is not good enough, they need to be composed canonically as well.

I love using the word 'canonical.'

[NiLuJe]

Not sure about Romanian specifically, but, provided the font has the correct 'solo' diatrics, the MOBI reader seems to support composed characters (at least to some extent, Vietnamese being one of these, giving the feedback we've already seen here). The browser doesn't, though, so, best use a font that's not relying on the composed characters feature.

[drac]

I've created two books (prc format) by "Ion Creangă" taken from Wikisource.

The books are "Povestea lui Stan Pățitul" and "Capra cu trei iezi".

I've tested them on Kindle for PC and all the characters are being displayed correctly (at first I've seen squares, but then Kindle has autoupdated itself and everything was OK)

Can an owner of Kindle3 do a test to see how the Romanian characters are being displayed?

Thanks.

[tomsem]

Looks like they are all supported on K3. I'll try to attach a screen shot when I have a chance (probably will be 12 hours or so).

[Blog Kindle]

Here are the screenshots. Although I don't know Romanian there doesn't seem to be any characters missing.






K3 did show some strange behavior on these PRC files though. Sometimes I wouldn't be able to page forward. As I kept pressing the button, eventually it would jump several pages ahead. I could then back up to the correct page and advance forward from there no problem. Anyone else seeing this?

[drac]

@tomsem, @Blog Kindle Thank you!

It looks that Kindle3 has perfect support for Romanian language: file system, book, and web browser support.

I have used "Mobipocket Creator" v4.2 to make those prc files, maybe it's not the best option, but it was the first I could think of (since I use Mobireader on my Windows Mobile phone).

In the constant fight between Kindle vs Nook, Kindle wins when it comes to Romanian language support , it works out of the box, no need to hack it anymore. Nook has the implicit Android bugs (Droid font cannot display one character), and it uses Amasis font, which lacks three out of five characters.

I do not have any more reasons not to buy a Kindle3 now!

[cypresstwist]

With custom firmware, the Nook can perfectly display any type of character. I installe de mynook.ru firmware and it allows you custom fonts. No problem with Romanian EPUB files.