Why do squares replace text letters?

[SUSGOD]

Sometimes my Cybook will replace text letters with squares. Most times it is temporary, I can jump ahead several "pages" and continue reading text (skipping the box section). The net time I read the book, the letters are back. Sometimes the boxes remain even after closing the book and reopening it at a later time. I can read the same file without boxes in my Windows Mobipocket Reader. It happens with 100% charge as well as 40% charge and everything in-between. Is there a reason besides gremlins?

Susan

[zelda_pinwheel]

that is very peculiar. i would have said it is a problem with unsupported special characters (accents or other alphabets, like greek) missing from the font, but clearly if the letters come back later this is not the case. have you noticed if this happens more on specific books than others ? have you tried redownloading the books to be sure they're not corrupted ? have you tried putting the books in the main memory (if they're on the memory card) or on the memory card (if they're on the main memory) ?

[tompe]

Maybe some font files are corrupted? I would try to change to another font and see if the problem remain.

[cbell]

I haven't seen that many squares together before, but I've found if a book has 2 hard line returns together they show as a square at the end of that sentence on a Cybook.

Removing 1 of the 2 hard line breaks removes the square. Maybe this isn't helpful in your case, though. If its just happening with a single book, I agree you should try the fixes suggested above.

[SUSGOD]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

that is very peculiar. i would have said it is a problem with unsupported special characters (accents or other alphabets, like greek) missing from the font, but clearly if the letters come back later this is not the case. have you noticed if this happens more on specific books than others ? have you tried redownloading the books to be sure they're not corrupted ? have you tried putting the books in the main memory (if they're on the memory card) or on the memory card (if they're on the main memory) ?

Sometimes the last part of a page will show as boxes, plus the next few pages. Sometimes several chapters will show as boxes. It happens with different books from different sources. I have tried downloading them again. My SD card doesn't work, so I only use the main memory. It appears to have nothing to do with the charge level.

[SUSGOD]

Originally Posted by tompe

Maybe some font files are corrupted? I would try to change to another font and see if the problem remain.

I tried that. The problem continues regardless of font. Am I the only one to experience this problem?

[zelda_pinwheel]

hm. curiouser and curiouser. perhaps tompe has hit on something though ; have you tried loading a completely new font and using that ?

also, is there any way you could borrow a memory card from someone to use for a test ?

perhaps if none of these suggestions work you should send an email to bookeen to ask for their advice.

[SandySchwab]

Originally Posted by SUSGOD

Sometimes my Cybook will replace text letters with squares.

Susan, I've had the same thing happen on Cybook a couple of times, both with books I'd downloaded here and from Fictionwise. However, all problems (including the bookmark function not working at times) stopped as soon as I started to use the SD card. I'm sorry this will obviously not work for you. But I wanted to let you know that you're definitely not alone with the mysterious squares.

[HarryT]

It's pretty obviously a font issue; have you done a "chkdsk" on the internal disk, where the fonts live?

[bwaldron]

Originally Posted by cbell

I haven't seen that many squares together before, but I've found if a book has 2 hard line returns together they show as a square at the end of that sentence on a Cybook.

Haven't seen that with the books/fonts I use.

[slayda]

You might try a SD card. You can get a 2GB for $7.99 & a 1GB for $4.00 here.

I agree with Harry that it seems like a file corruption or possibly your Cybook storage is nearly maxed out. Is yours the 64MB or the 512MB & how full is it?

Anyway the SD cards are very cheap and putting your books on the SD may help. I'm using a 1GB SD card and have about 250 books on it. The 2GB that Cybook sent did not work with my Cybook but works fine in my camera.

[cbell]

Originally Posted by bwaldron

Haven't seen that with the books/fonts I use.

Try viewing a txt file downloaded directly from www.gutenberg.org with the default Cybook fonts. e.g. 3lion10.txt (A Tale of Three Lions) - I see lots of squares.

[rheostaticsfan]

I get this frequently when converting book formats...often the em-dash and apostrophes and quotes get replaced by squares.

The only way I know to fix this is to go back to the html and replace the "special characters" with non-special characters.

I doubt that was helpful...but more data for your investigation.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by rheostaticsfan

The only way I know to fix this is to go back to the html and replace the "special characters" with non-special characters.

FYI, you can replace "special characters" with HTML entities:

— is an em-dash
“ is a left double (curly) quote
etc.

[tompe]

It you declare the charset correctly in the html file it ought to work. I know that I fixed html2mobi so it works. And I assume that MobiPocket creator also works with respect to this.