I just can't quite figure it out...
Although I haven't yet tried the SSH access (I don't know much about this, so will try to learn how to do it in Ubuntu over the weekend), I figured it might be possible to change encoding manually in the files using Calibre.
I therefore changed the encoding on one file, to see if I could get FBReader to recognize it properly. I encoded the same file in a number of different formats by changing the source encoding.
I tried "US-ASCII", "windows-1252", "ISO-8859" and "UTF-8" as well as a few variants on these in case I was getting the syntax wrong (forgive me if my vocabulary is wrong... I'm not that familiar with this).
When I opened the files in FBReader on my Ubuntu desktop, the default conversion worked fine so long as I changed it to ASCII, so I know that it isn't fundementally a font issue.
The problem is that when I bring them to my ebook reader and openinkpot, I still get the similar strange symbols, despite trying all sorts of encoding in different files. In fact, I could tolerate it, but one of the symbols not represented is the apostrophe, which is variously replaced as the Euro symbol and a trademark symbol.
I downloaded some of the openinkpot fonts, just to confirm, but from the font description, I can see that the apostrophe is there, so clearly that isn't the issue.
So I guess I know it is an encoding issue.
My question is whether or not there is a default encoding in Openinkpot's FBReader. I suspect not, because otherwise one of the multiple encodings I tried should have worked no?
Which then leads me to believe that it is set to automatically detect the encoding, and keeps getting it wrong, no matter what the encoding. Is this possible?
I guess I really need to go learn how to modify the books.xls file...
If someone can confirm that there is no way to solve the problem through encoding source files, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks,