Does Kobo Supports Chinese...?

[ebookrights]

1. On her publishing platform.
2. On her ereader.
3. On her applications for PC, Android, iPhone...

[wjohnson]

First of all Kobo does not have any Chinese books in store.

NO.
NO.
Not sure. You donot really need KOBO application to read your own stuff.


If you would like to read Chinese books(.epub) on KOBO ereader, You need to put the Chinese fonts into every single epub or convert epub to pdf.

[BunnyFromMars]

Well I don't know yet so we'll find out:

I downloaded a pdf of a chinese novel, and it doesn't work on the ereader. Half the title shows up properly, but even the body of the text as pdf doesn't show up.
I then converted it into epub (through an online converter, somehow Calibre doesn't work either), and the text shows up as little squares (whereas previously in the pdf it's just blank)

So i'm going to try some font packages and get back to you.

As for the apps on android and stuff, I can't really answer because i dont' have one.

BTW wjohnson: You do not need to confine yourself to whatever a given bookstore has to offer. Any literature in any language is worth reading, and many times we confine our intellectual scope by limiting ourselves to one language. Many things are lost in translation, and the more vantage points we have, the better our world views are going to be. So i personally think it's such a shame that many product/software developers (esp. based in the United States) do not see that. Even now as I'm typing on my mac, I cannot read Chinese TXT files, I cannot find a way to read a non-latin language on my Kobo...I feel constrained and it's not very comfortable.

I'll go search for a solution and get back to you guys.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by ebookrights

1. On her publishing platform.
2. On her ereader.
3. On her applications for PC, Android, iPhone...

One thing to make clear is that I do not read either Simplified or Traditional Chinese. I do have some friends and co-workers who do and I've helped a few of them to configure their ereaders to allow reading Chinese language texts.

Kobo publishing platform is close to epub3 so not a problem. You can use the language direction directives. You do have to rename an epub to .kepub.epub to use the ACCESS renderer on the Kobo ereaders to make use of the epub3 features.

On the ereader, if you add a font that supports Chinese characters, you can read Chinese (simplified or traditional). Currently, my preferred fonts are Microsoft Arial Unicode or Code2000. See about adding fonts to a Kobo ereader with emphasis on font naming and the directory in which to put the fonts. Basically, as long as the font is installed and you select the font in the font dialog, reading is not an issue. The table of contents is a bit iffier. I prefer to add the fonts to the ereader rather than embedding them in the epub just to keep the file size down.

One issue is that quite a few Chinese language texts seem to treat each chapter as a paragraph which does trigger the Kobo long paragraphs being split oddly bug.

Searching for books is an issue which has been worked around by using pinyin for the author and title in the metadata.

I've never tried to read Chinese epubs with Kobo's application platforms so can't offer an opinion.

See the Modified Fonts sticky for more information on fonts. Link is https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=204363

Regards,
David

[BunnyFromMars]

I am pretty sure it's a thing with the font. If you create a new folder under the kobo ereader main thing named "fonts", you can copy .ttf files in there. Here is a video tutorial on the process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=KU7JpaKlyMc

However this didn't work with my epub file when I tried it. So I'm going to sleep and keep searching.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by BunnyFromMars

I am pretty sure it's a thing with the font. If you create a new folder under the kobo ereader main thing named "fonts", you can copy .ttf files in there. Here is a video tutorial on the process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=KU7JpaKlyMc

However this didn't work with my epub file when I tried it. So I'm going to sleep and keep searching.

You need to make sure the font file has the correct name -- on a Windows computer, open it with Windows Font Viewer to see the correct name. And after copying the font files into the fonts directory (the name must be fonts is all lower case), you need to power cycle the Kobo before using the font.

I've attached a copy of Code2000 to this message. It displays a good chunk of CJK.

Regards,
David