iPad iPad character support

[charleski]

Adobe Digital Editions is notorious for its limited character support.
It would be interesting if someone with a new iPad could download the attached epub and see how much of the unicode space is supported by iBooks. It doesn't have an embedded font, so any characters that show up are native to the iPad.

The code tables have been shamelessly ripped from Wikipedia and include the bulk of the unicode set apart from Canadian aboriginal syllabics, CJK and Yi. I'd be surprised if the iPad renders everything, but would be interested to know if there are any blocks where the iPad is missing a lot of characters.

[Valloric]

This is a great idea charleski, I'd like to see the results of this test too.

[Jonah K]

Originally Posted by charleski

Adobe Digital Editions is notorious for its limited character support.
It would be interesting if someone with a new iPad could download the attached epub and see how much of the unicode space is supported by iBooks. It doesn't have an embedded font, so any characters that show up are native to the iPad.

The code tables have been shamelessly ripped from Wikipedia and include the bulk of the unicode set apart from Canadian aboriginal syllabics, CJK and Yi. I'd be surprised if the iPad renders everything, but would be interested to know if there are any blocks where the iPad is missing a lot of characters.

I couldn't load that document on my iPad -- it caused iTunes on my Mac to crash.

However, the iPad does support unicode. I downloaded a few free Chinese literature books by Gao Li and the Chinese characters were perfectly rendered.

[Fat Abe]

This file loads fine into iTunes and the iPad, at least from a PC. The Latin Extended-A and -B look ok for the most part (see next paragraph). Even the female ordinal indicator (U+00aa) is correct! Latin Extended-A looks ok in Calibre. But when Calibre gets to set B, it displays a solid rectangular glyph. ADE does not display either of these two character sets properly. The Firefox add-on, Epubreader 1.2.7.1 bombs on the file.

Now the exceptions on the iPad begin with U+01f6 (Latin Capital letter Hwair). Next is U+01f7. The exceptions occur sporadically from this point on. There are some major holes starting with the Cyrillic set (e.g., U+0464). The Cyrillic Supplement is a nada. I didn't pursue this further, since Apple still has a lot of homework to do with the iBook app.

I'll tell you how the latest Sony readers perform tomorrow.

[charleski]

Thanks Fat Abe. Sony readers use ADE, so they will be unable to display the vast majority of the characters without a different font.

There shouldn't be any problems loading it into iTunes - it loads fine for me and is a perfectly compliant epub. Has anyone else had a problem with iTunes on the Mac as well?

If the iPad can handle Extended-A and most of Extended-B then it should be good for Western European alphabets. But I'm a bit shocked that it has problems with Cyrillic. How does it do on Hebrew and Arabic?

[Valloric]

Latin Extended-A displays out of the box?

Hell yeah. Totally made my day.

Thanks Fat Abe.

[Fat Abe]

Here are some more results:

Armenian - complete

Hebrew - mostly complete except for U+05be to 05c6 (these are punctuation symbols, and the range is not fully defined). The letters in the alphabet are complete.

Arabic - mostly complete except for U+0600 to 0603 (these are punctuation marks)

Syriac - none

Arabic Supplement - none

Thaana - none

N'Ko - none

Latin Extended Additional - mostly complete except for U+1e9c to 1e9e, and U+1efa to 1eff.

Block elements - mostly complete except for U+2596 to 259f (quadrants)

Geometric Shapes - complete. Hooray!

Miscellaneous Symbols - mostly complete. At least the chess symbols are all there. I saw around 7 musical notes and signs.

Dingbats - mostly complete.

Miscellaneous Mathematical symbols - none. This is a shame, although most of these are arcane and not used by most mathematicians, except me. Lol.

All in all outstanding, out of the box. The OP should email apple support on the missing characters.

[frabjous]

Out of curiousity, how's the Greek support? I'd guess that'd be pretty important, so my fingers are crossed.

Originally Posted by Fat Abe

Here are some more results:
Miscellaneous Mathematical symbols - none. This is a shame, although most of these are arcane and not used by most mathematicians, except me. Lol.

Ugh. The book I'm working on has some.

In particular it has:

⊃ (superset/oldschool material implication)
≡ (oldschool material equivalence)
∃ (existential quantifier)
∨ (disjunction wedge)
ℵ (aleph symbol; from "letterlike symbols")
♯/♭ (sharp/flat from musical notation)
½ (one-half)
⊢ (right tack/turnstile)
→ (right arrow)

Anyone care to test these?

I wouldn't mind embedding a font if only it supported them. So, really, no embedded font support in ePubs? Not even .eot fonts?

[lizcastro]

As far as I can tell, both Safari and iBooks on iPad support all of the 252 entities in HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0: http://www.bit.ly/Entities