(I continue to enjoy this forum.)

I convert a lot of text for the Reader (primarily with BookDesigner) and am on the whole very satisfied. From time to time, however, I attempt to convert text from another language (German, Swedish, French) and umlauted letters, acute or grave accents or a-rings come out as gobbeldygook. Is there some way to remedy this? Or, is there any other converter (not the PDF route) to do foreign language conversions?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

~ Rb

If you want to use foreign languages, you need fonts that can support this. PDF will work, because you can embed fonts with PDF. I've seen people uploading fonts to their reader or embedding fonts in LRF files on the forum, use the search feature, you should find the right topics.

I've seen this too sometimes on RTF files a special letter with an accent or something will show up as a ? instead. But later in the book the same letter will show up correctly. Not sure why sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.

(I continue to enjoy this forum.)

I convert a lot of text for the Reader (primarily with BookDesigner) and am on the whole very satisfied. From time to time, however, I attempt to convert text from another language (German, Swedish, French) and umlauted letters, acute or grave accents or a-rings come out as gobbeldygook. Is there some way to remedy this? Or, is there any other converter (not the PDF route) to do foreign language conversions?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

~ Rb
Bookdesigner has an option for language. I use "french" most of the time sine a lot of my books have french accents. Just choose the right language, and it should do right for you.

It is important to use a unicode font such as Lucida Sans Unicode or Arial Unicode MS.

Many fonts do not support the UTF-8 standard which represents nearly every character to be found in the world.

Commonly used glyphs (e.g., é, ü, â) are included in almost every computer font, not just unicode fonts. I've had trouble getting these symbols to render correctly on the Sony Reader (they work fine on my Hiebook and Gemstar readers).

They render correctly on my EBookwise too using Times New Roman in the original RTF file.

But then I have only ever needed to use the common accented characters.

It looks like the problem is down to the Sony Reader -- surely a software update from Sony could fix this?

rb49, it appears to be a problem with Book Designer and HTML Entities. I've posted in the Book Designer thread http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7897&goto=lastpost about the problem. BBeBinder and HTML2LRF work fine with accented characters.
Are you using HTML entities like 'ä ;' ?

rb49, it appears to be a problem with Book Designer and HTML Entities. I've posted in the Book Designer thread http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7897&goto=lastpost about the problem. BBeBinder and HTML2LRF work fine with accented characters.
Are you using HTML entities like 'ä ;' ?

These HTML entities are just encoded unicode characters. You can easily replace them with their unicode equivalent.