Does Sony Reader support Japanese?

[tekchic]

I'm learning Japanese, and I was curious if the reader would be able to display katakana, hiragana, or kanji.

Has anyone tried it? Thought it'd be nice for practice if I could just have my worksheets on my Reader instead of carring around yet another Japanese book.

[njt]

Originally Posted by tekchic

I'm learning Japanese, and I was curious if the reader would be able to display katakana, hiragana, or kanji.

Has anyone tried it? Thought it'd be nice for practice if I could just have my worksheets on my Reader instead of carring around yet another Japanese book.

You'd need to convert whatever you were looking into a pdf to display it. There is another thread (check the korean thread) that has it working. The instructions are quite complicated so if you want to try it, then you can have it running in Japanese without the need of a pdf^^;

[db100]

I have to say the Korean method is fake. Right now the only working method is to add your fonts to 3 *.ttf files under FONT/ directory without change fonts name or file name. Just add to the same file. I guess the fonts alias is hard coded in **truetype**.so file so unless you can re-make those lib file, add another *ttf to FONT/ and modify main.xml will never work.

However, Russian fonts are very small, Japanese, or CJK, or any Asian unicode fonts usually are bigger than 2M in size. Think about you only have 7M space total in mtd14, I don't think Korean method will work.

Originally Posted by njt

You'd need to convert whatever you were looking into a pdf to display it. There is another thread (check the korean thread) that has it working. The instructions are quite complicated so if you want to try it, then you can have it running in Japanese without the need of a pdf^^;

[HarryT]

No need to add fonts to the machine. Creating a PDF file with embedded fonts should work fine.

[segatang]

As my knowledge, small font of PDF displayed on Sony Reader is not clear.
Have this feature been improved? Any new firmware released?
I think if the asian fonts of txt, rtf, or html can be natively read, it will be fine for worldwide sale of Sony Reader.

[db100]

The point is, SONY does not want world wide sale of Sony Reader only. What Sony really need is world wide sale of Connect books.

SONY Reader already has a multi-language kernel. The problem is from fonts.

Originally Posted by segatang

it will be fine for worldwide sale of Sony Reader.

[YKM]

First, copy the Japanese text into MS Word. Use MS Mincho font, with font size of 12pts or bigger, and bold the text (this is important, because without it, characters becomes too faint to read clearly in Sony Reader).

Use the Page Setup settings and PDF printer settings described in the User’s Guide to create PDF documents for the Sony Reader. Then, save Japanese text files as PDF file by sending to PDF printer.

You can view the saved file in Sony Reader directly, but up to a certain maximum file size (about 40 pages?). Anything beyond that, the screen will be blank when you open the file in Sony Reader. This limitation appears to be due to the big size of the Mincho font embedded in the PDF file.

In order to circumvent the file size limit, you can save the PDF file as image files (JPEG) using Adobe Acrobat. The file will be split into a number of image files with numbers running in sequence. You can combine these separate image files back into a PDF by right clicking the first image file, and selecting “Combine in Adobe Acrobat….”. When the dialog box appears, you go to browse, and select the remaining image files, and press O.K.

The resulting image may not be as clear as the original text. Conversion to image files somehow produces slight gray smears round the character, giving them a look of old text. I rather like the effect!

[AnemicOak]

Originally Posted by segatang

As my knowledge, small font of PDF displayed on Sony Reader is not clear.
Have this feature been improved?

It's not the Sony's fault, well not exactly anyway. It's just that most PDF's are sized to A4/Letter size & therefore don't work well on the small screen. If the PDF is set up to be the dimensions of the Readers screen they should display fine.