Japanese characters do not display :-(
 

Hi all,

and thanks all of you for the great job you've done about this Sony Reader. I've used many of your materials since the day I bought my PRS-505 in Paris, France. :-) Thanks again.

Here is my question. I've been studying Japanese for a while, and I'd like to read some japanese rtf files on my PRS-505. I've used the PRSCustomizer where I checked the Unicode Fonts checkbox... but I cannot read any Japanese.

When I send a RTF file to my PRS using eBook Library software, Japanese characters are broken (replaced by squares) in file content as in file name.

Would anybody help me on that subject ??? Thanks in advance :-)

vincent

that sounds like a problem of font support ; have you verified that the font currently installed supports japanese characters ? you might have to install a new one. i recommend looking at this thread if you decide to try that.

Actually, I now have Japanese characters in books title, but white squares in books content.
I'd like not to have to convert all my documents to PDF... Any idea ? Thanks ;-)

hm. do the titles use the same font as the body text ? how many fonts does 505 have by default ? sorry i can't help you more specifically, i have no 505. but i'm sure someone will have an answer for you.

Reader's RTF support for any language besides English is rather lacking. I suggest you to try converting your books to LRF with Calibre (it might work better if you save the RTF as HTML and convert that).

<sigh>Converting to pdf with embeded fonts was the solution I was going to propose </sigh>

However, there might be a slightly dangerous way to read rtf files.

1. Look up the thread with a very detailed description of font replacement for PRS505
2. Replace the font with some other NON JAPANESE font. See next point why.
3. Restore the original font, writing detailed notes on what you exactly did. Remember, you might need to do this with Reader with unreadable menus in case your Japanese fonts do not work.
4. Replace the font with your desired font with Japanese characters.

Keep in mind that the reader was not designed to support this.
If several thousand books on the SD card can crash the Reader, or cause reader to "lock up" for up to 90 minutes, a font with many, many thousand chracters instead of 256 might very well have some ... aehm ... Unforeseen Undesirable Side Effects (Tm) ;-)

Why would Reader menus become unreadable? All Japanese fonts include Latin glyphs too. And anyway, as you can see hirooekimae's second post, he did succeed in seeing Japanese filenames.

And why would Reader become *extremely* unresponsive and unpredictable if you load it up with 5000 rtf books on an sd card? Especially when a standard SD card can easily hold even more books? Not mentioning 8GB Memory stick.

I can imagine that a font file featuring Japanese characters is magnitude bigger than a font with Latin + a few fancy characters + Azbuka.

Chinese users happily use fonts which are a few times bigger than Japanese, so the font size is not an issue.

Hi all... I finally succeded in reading my Japanese books on my new PRS-505. :-)

I had to downgrade its firmware so as to be able to install a Chinese font package I found somewhere on this site.

Thanks all for your help.... :-)

How did you do this
 

I'd also like to add Japanese fonts