[readingglasses]

went back to indigo, tested microsdhc. went in all the way, flush with machine edge (the one I used before must've been a little blocked and so the card was just never read by the machine). All while avoiding a certain somebody I never thought I'd see again, right in the store.

it had firmware 1.9.5 (june 27th or stg).

epub, html, various text formats (utf8, unicode, ansi). NO pdf testing, I'm just assuming pdf's are fine.
anc. greek from gutenberg project looked nice except for occasional question marks. pehs they were compound characters?

english control group files were displayed perfectly.

arabic, hebrew and kanji a total question mark. just question marks instead of proper characters. I can't even tell if it's in the right direction because it's just q-marks and it's all centered.

perseus project with its greek texts in the web browser, all the greek was just replaced by a few dashes. the english all around it displayed fine.
I wonder how to set the font in the kobo browser. Would be nice if they keep updating the browser, so stg like changing character encoding, as you can in mozilla, would be useful for non-latin alphabet websites.

I wonder though, if this isn't also an issue with what fonts are loaded on the kobo? Maybe if one added fonts that were meant for any of these languages to the fonts folder, would it help?

Metamutator, might I ask, did you add any special font in order to see telugu in its basic form,even without the compound letters displaying properly?

This issue of compound characters is a bit confusing. whether telugu compound digraphs or classical greek normal letters compounded with accents, these are all just glyphs that must be included in a font to display. the machine is not "interpreting the language" and then drawing the compounds, it's just referencing glyphs in whatever font is in use and the font either has them or it doesn't. and some fonts have a subset of glyphs for any language. some common fonts have greek alphabet but not ALL the glyphs for classical greek. Some arabic/hebrew fonts are very limited, containing no vocalized or specially pointed glyphs.

perhaps there is a very involved mechanism for displaying compound characters in telugu, or another similar type of compound alphabet, korean hangul. but it stretches credulity, that so much artificial intelligence would be used when referencing glyphs is the obvious choice. and with arabic and hebrew (and especially chinese), there are almost no compounds, only different forms (vocalization is a kind of compound that could be ignored and left as unvocalized letter or could be displayed as a q-mark, like perhaps classical greek accented letters, and with arabic, it's the letter in its place, with different connective lines depending on position in a word).
I don't know how to add fonts while using the kobo, from an sd card or if it can be done. I only know how to add fonts from a pc when its connected.
maybe adding appropriate glyph-including fonts would solve it/help it.

and it really is just the cutest little device. that e-paper is absolutely like reading a printed page, so easy on the eyes. and it has a very solid yet unassumingly cheap material feel and relaxed yet business like square shape. light as a feather. a real shame if it there's no way to make foreign writing systems work on reflowable formats (epub, txt, html).