Quote:
Originally Posted by summerholt
Thank you Sylver for the detailed answer and the pictures! I really appreciate it! 
I am a ereader newby and don't understand the quoted parts from your reply. For example, what does it mean to embed Chinese in a pdf file? How do I know whether a Chinese pdf file that I have already has embedded Chinese or not? How do I embed Chinese font myself? Does Calibre provide a stylesheet or do I need to provide it myself when I convert a .txt files?
I just want to have some off the shelf solution that does not require me to be tech-savvy. Does the nook inherently support Chinese?
Thanks! |
I am a newbie also and will try to do my best. First, there are different kinds of PDFs, some are just repackage of raster images whose fonts (basically image by itself) cannot be enlarged without loosing the sharpness. Some the text part only contains the code in a particular encoding and possibly with some kind of style sheet to tell the system or the reader which font should be used when rendering the PDF - if the font specificed in the "style sheet" is not present, the system or the reader usually will render it using some default system font. Yet there are some that already have the fonts embedded in the PDF file (it carries the font together with the text), this kind of PDF usually is significantly larger in size (as it needs to embed the font into the file), but you can read the content on any device as it does not need system to provide the font, it has its own - although the file name or the title/author information may still show garbage in the reader's library index page as the system still fails to render these info that is more of a meta data not part of the contents. Now I dont know exactly how to tell if a PDF is already embedded with the Chinese font if the file is not created by myself, if it is significantly bigger and can be read on your Sony without any hack, it is most likely embedded.
To embed Chinese font in a PDF, assuming you have acrobat 8 installed, when printing from a word document to a PDF file, there is one option that says something like "Use only system fonts" that is checked by default, if you UNCHECK that option - which means you want to use fonts that OTHER than the system fonts - it will automatically embed the font you specified in the word document to the resulting PDF file, obviously the file size will be much bigger than if you leave that option checked. You can try both option on the same file to compare the resulting file size and it will be immediately noticeable. There is similar option available in Calibre that will embed your fonts into the resulting epub file which I haven't tried. PDFs already embedded with Chinese fonts will look exactly on the nook as it shows, you can still enlarge the font size in the nook, and the nook will still try to reflow the content (break into new pages and lines based on the new font size) for you, however, the nook - and most other readers - will not be smart enough to reformat it or wrap the lines nicely, most probably you will see the original line breaks now appearing in the middle of a line and page breaks in the middle of a page, etc.
When compiling an epub file, Calibre also lets you customize the style sheet to tell the reader which font to use without physically embedding the Chinese font in the final epub. The resulting epub with Chinese text can only be read on a system that supports Unicode and has unicode font that can render Chinese, and luckily, the nook meets both criteria. The nook does not readily support Chinese out of the box, but it does inherently support Chinese and supports it pretty well in the epub format.
To do that, you will need two steps. First, you may first need to convert your material (no matter what format it currently is) to a unicode .txt file, and if it's already a .txt file, make sure it's not encoded in GB2312 or other encodings (as most txt files I downloaded from free text-based ebook sites hosted in China are), to be safe, I always open such .txt in tools like ultraedit, and do a file conversion and save it to UTF-8 (unicode editing). This takes a couple of seconds.
Next, load the UTF-8 encoded .txt file in Calibre, right click on it then choose conver -> convert individually, on the popup dialog, there are several options, first is add your own image as the cover art, and you can type in the meta data info such as title or author in Chinese here; the next is the "look and feel", and this is the one you should apply your style sheet, on this tab there is something called "extra .css", in the text box you will need to put some customization code to specify which font file you want it to use.
The exact script you need to paste into that "extra css" text box can be found on the following thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=75191
read it carefully, the thread has two scripts, the first one uses user's own Chinese font MSYaHei (微软雅黑), which requires you to put the font file in ttf format onto the root of the MicroSD card. The second script in the updated thread uses the nook's system font to display Chinese (or languages android natively supported as the nook is running on the android system) so you don't have to put your own font file on the system or the MicroSD card, and this is the method I used in my example . You can leave other options at default then convert the file, the compilation usually only takes a minute or two and you will have a resulting epub file that you can just copy over to the nook (if it does not take effect immediately, you may need to restart the nook or just switch one system font back and forth one time).
The nook does not readily support Chinese out of the box, but if you are willing to invest just a couple of minutes as outlined above, the Chinese display looks fantastic. This method should also work with the Sony readers if you can find the right system font and its path in the Sony reader that supports unicode to replace the "DroidFont" used in the above script.
If the above does not seem too much a challenge for you, then look no further than the nook.
If, after reading the above, you still dont think this is your cup of tea and really wanted to just do nothing (although I still believe you will need to convert Chinese text encoded in Big5 or GB2312 to unicode) and be able to read Chinese. Astak is the one you should look at if you reside in the US. The Astak EZReader PocketPro (5") and the EZReader 6" both support Chinese and customized fonts very well if you can bear with their greenish-yellowish low contrast screen (I cannot); the Astak Mentor (they also call it Mentor Lite) is a 6" that supports Chinese and has very nice screen contrast similar to Sony PRS 300 but the onboard Chinese font is ugly and you cannot customize the font. The border's kobo looks suspiciously similar to the Astak mentor, so is Cool-er, I think these are rebrands from the same device made in China, but if they dont officially say they support Chinese, chances are you will need to do some hack to make it work - the hack, however easy it may be, will still take more effort than just editing the extra .css in the Calibre.
Hope this helps.