foreign characters in txt files garbled on kobo

[naltar]

Hello,
Every now and then, I have this extreme idea of reading a book in a txt format AND in a foreign language, which come with plenty of diacritics. Extreme, because whenver I drop a txt book file and open it on my kobo (aura, 1st edition), foreign characters are mingled. Now, to make txt files (and diacritics) as compatible as possible, I originally them on pc as utf-8, but this is, clearly, not good enough for Kobo
So, I wonder if there a solution to this issue? Other than converting txt to epub or html, which works, of course, but that's not exactly the solution I'm after. And why not? Because I want to read in txt format, and because I like that txt is relatively clean file format, plus, strangely enough, I'm not that happy with calibre user interface, and having to dig to find the output, and having multiple formats of one file on my computer). So it's not exactly that I want to get from A to B by any means of transport, I want to get there by that rickety (?) txt bus promised by Kobo...

Regards,
n.

p.s. I had a go with Kobo chat, but as expected, it was a failure. I mean, they were being nice, but as to substance, a total failure: "try to re-download the files", "try to download via Adobe Digital Editions", and then came a double facepalm "I have not heard about utf-8 files before... I have searched for the file compatibility and do not see this file type... Books: EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, and MOBI, Text: TXT, HTML, and RTF".

[JSWolf]

I've never tried to read a text file. Is it possible to change the font? The problem most likely is that the font used doesn't have those characters.

[rashkae]

Since the text reading app is probably firmly within the open source portion of kobo software, (which is a complete assumption on my part,), the git repository might be a good place to bring up this issue.

https://github.com/kobolabs/Kobo-Reader

[John F]

Originally Posted by naltar

Hello,
Every now and then, I have this extreme idea of reading a book in a txt format AND in a foreign language, which come with plenty of diacritics. Extreme, because whenver I drop a txt book file and open it on my kobo (aura, 1st edition), foreign characters are mingled. Now, to make txt files (and diacritics) as compatible as possible, I originally them on pc as utf-8, but this is, clearly, not good enough for Kobo
So, I wonder if there a solution to this issue? Other than converting txt to epub or html, which works, of course, but that's not exactly the solution I'm after. And why not? Because I want to read in txt format, and because I like that txt is relatively clean file format, plus, strangely enough, I'm not that happy with calibre user interface, and having to dig to find the output, and having multiple formats of one file on my computer). So it's not exactly that I want to get from A to B by any means of transport, I want to get there by that rickety (?) txt bus promised by Kobo...

Regards,
n.

p.s. I had a go with Kobo chat, but as expected, it was a failure. I mean, they were being nice, but as to substance, a total failure: "try to re-download the files", "try to download via Adobe Digital Editions", and then came a double facepalm "I have not heard about utf-8 files before... I have searched for the file compatibility and do not see this file type... Books: EPUB, EPUB3, PDF, and MOBI, Text: TXT, HTML, and RTF".

Maybe try saving as a Unicode text file (code page 1200 or 1201) and use an appropriate font?

[geek1011]

Originally Posted by rashkae

Since the text reading app is probably firmly within the open source portion of kobo software, (which is a complete assumption on my part,), the git repository might be a good place to bring up this issue.

https://github.com/kobolabs/Kobo-Reader

The reader, nickel, is not open source. Even so, the GitHub repo is a good way to report issues. Someone from kobo responds quite fast, except for the last 2 weeks (they have gone unusually silent to my bug reports).

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by John F

Maybe try saving as a Unicode text file (code page 1200 or 1201) and use an appropriate font?

This is probably the answer. Thee text file saved as the appropriate format to handle the Unicode characters properly, and then the correct font used.

For the fonts, the built-in Kobo Tsukushi Mincho and Kobo UD Kagugo might be enough. They probably have the largest set of characters (I know it's not the right word, but I'm still drinking my first coffee for the day). Otherwise, sideloading a font that contains everything needed would be the thing to do.

@naltar: Personally, I would suggest learning how to convert these files to epub. Part of the point of these formats is to supply the hints to the reading software about what is in the book and let it do some of this work for you. You may still need to find an appropriate font, but it becomes simpler. Also, there is a lot of formatting in most books that is completely missing in TXT file.

[Anak]

Or try to convert the encoding of the original txt file to ANSI, UTF-8, or UTF-8 with BOM and check if special characters are properly displayed.
Use Notepad++, it is free and easy to use.