Does the Reader support ebooks in Russian or Greek?

[Martinitolove]

Does the Reader support ebooks in Russian or Greek?

[Slava]

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

[igorsk]

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.

[scotty1024]

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.

[Slava]

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

[doctorow]

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

[Slava]

>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

[Bob Russell]

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

[Slava]

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

[Martinitolove]

Hey Slava,

when are you gettin' yours?

[Slava]

Originally Posted by Martinitolove

Hey Slava, when are you gettin' yours?

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

Update: Delivery date just changed to 10/07

[kurochka]

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

[Slava]

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

Hopefully, someone will do that

[ath]

Originally Posted by kurochka

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.

[vvv]

Originally Posted by Slava

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_f.../Las-Vegas.lrf