Quote:
Originally Posted by qariwa55
I did try pdf, but that did not work for me. I cannot get the font large enough, and then I also have problems getting the document to fit the page.
As for OpenOffice/LibreOffice, it does support Arabic after setting the configuration properly. For conversion to epub, there is also an add-on, Writer2Epub, that does the job, sorta, but it adds way too many html elements in the epub file, and presumes fonts in the CSS, which I would have to change. I don't really like that conversion.
I have used calibre the way you suggest. It is only as good as the xhtml/css editor you use on your epub. I have tried sigil as well, and now like it better than calibre for this purpose. Except that sigil does not support right-to-left editing, and the only free html editor that I have found that does, bluegriffon, is not free for css files, which is the main issue. I have just left the actual Arabic letters intact in my documents, which so far has not been a problem.
For turning Arabic html documents into epubs, or combining html docs into epubs, I have found a much better solution than copying to OpenOffice and then converting: I use the GrabMyBooks add-on to Firefox. This produces much cleaner epub files than what Writer2Epub or calibre produce, without a lot of extra garbage. Then I have much less tweaking to do.
Hebrew does have many of the same issues of Arabic, but does not have the problem with combining forms -- usually the main problem.
Oh, I forgot to note that Arabic TTS support in Pocketbook does not work right. The reading comes out left to right and it sounds ridiculous! Each word is pronounced very nicely though. Maybe I need to go through SVOX on that.
I suppose I should open a thread on Arabic in the epub files discussion area, but I get the feeling there are few people interested.
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You seem like you are ahead of me in this. I just got the Pocketbook 612 (b/c I TRIED making a Sony work, and as far as I can tell, you have to root your device to do that).
This, just like you said, reads fine when unvoweled, but when voweled (the majority of epubs I find), it, as you mentioned, comes stand alone. What is the best way to handle this that you have found? Can you explain it in simple terms? Like I have Calibre, but haven't figured out how to embed a font in a way that works (or rather these files read just fine in Calibre, but not on my Pocketbook).
And I haven't tried upgrading the firmware. I read the notes, and I don't think it helps with this problem anyways.