Character translation problem

[James_Wilde]

This may not be Calibre related, but the assembled talent in this forum can probably give me a pointer to how I may solve the problem.

I have a document in odt format (Open Office) and in pdf format. It contains certain words in pinyin, which, for those who may not know, is a way of representing the sounds of Mandarin Chinese using accented western characters. A good example is the phrase Zhèngshān xiǎozhǒng (which is the Mandarin name for Lapsang Souchong tea). These documents have been created on my Mac, which I believe uses UTF-8 natively.

When converted to epub by Calibre, the epubs created from both original documents show the accented letters as above, both in Calibre and in Stanza. (Stanza does not show these characters italicized, which they are in the original and which Calibre shows.) When I load the document onto my Iriver Story, however, I see the accented "a" in Zhèngshān and both the accented characters in xiǎozhǒng as question marks - in other words the Story can't produce them. Note that the accented "e" in Zhèngshān comes over without problem. That is, let's face it, a standard accent in French and other European languages.

If anyone can give me a lead as to what I might be able to try to get the epub document to show all these characters on my Story - and by extrapolation on other ebook readers - I'd be very grateful. I've tried creating a document comprising just these two words in a variety of typefaces and converting, and in every case the three symbols are replaced by a question mark, so it's not a case of the difference between, say, Times and Times New Roman. I also tried using Calibre on a Windows XP box, but I copied the test file from my Mac instead of creating a new one, so although I believe XP uses ISO-8859 natively instead of UTF-8, the product came out in UTF-8.

Thanks in advance.

[kovidgoyal]

You need to embed appropriate fonts in the epub. calibre cant do that for you as yet, but search this forum for threads on how to do it.