Quote:
Originally Posted by kacir
Here is the "e-reader for Hebrew" thread.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=105910
It looks like FBReader is hopeless.
Adobe Reader that displays e-pub is the best choice, it seems.
epub file is basically just zip file with html inside. So you can rename it to .epub.zip and unzip it to look inside. Zipping it back, well, that is more complicated, because the file manifest has to be non-compressed inside the archive and has to be at the beginning. Calibre can take the epub apart for you ant then pack it back together. Just right-click on a book in Calibre and select Tweak epub from menu. Calibre will create temporary directory with contents of epub inside. After you play with files Calibre will offer to pack files back into epub.
By the way, OpenOffice/LibreOffice odt files can be renamed to epub and opened on PocketBook, but that is ugly, UGLY hack, because file format is not identical, just similar enough to work (most of the time, in one of PocketBook aplications). |
I did try pdf, but that did not work for me. I cannot get the font large enough, and then I also have problems getting the document to fit the page.
As for OpenOffice/LibreOffice, it does support Arabic after setting the configuration properly. For conversion to epub, there is also an add-on, Writer2Epub, that does the job, sorta, but it adds way too many html elements in the epub file, and presumes fonts in the CSS, which I would have to change. I don't really like that conversion.
I have used calibre the way you suggest. It is only as good as the xhtml/css editor you use on your epub. I have tried sigil as well, and now like it better than calibre for this purpose. Except that sigil does not support right-to-left editing, and the only free html editor that I have found that does, bluegriffon, is not free for css files, which is the main issue. I have just left the actual Arabic letters intact in my documents, which so far has not been a problem.
For turning Arabic html documents into epubs, or combining html docs into epubs, I have found a much better solution than copying to OpenOffice and then converting: I use the GrabMyBooks add-on to Firefox. This produces much cleaner epub files than what Writer2Epub or calibre produce, without a lot of extra garbage. Then I have much less tweaking to do.
Hebrew does have many of the same issues of Arabic, but does not have the problem with combining forms -- usually the main problem.
Oh, I forgot to note that Arabic TTS support in Pocketbook does not work right. The reading comes out left to right and it sounds ridiculous! Each word is pronounced very nicely though. Maybe I need to go through SVOX on that.
I suppose I should open a thread on Arabic in the epub files discussion area, but I get the feeling there are few people interested.