need ereader for chinese

[petechan]

I'm sorry if this comment is not in line with what is being discussed here.

From Sylver's comments and in the examples he gives on the nook screen I can surmise that his knowledge of Chinese is quite deep since he uses classical texts in his reading.

I don't know what the reading level of Mr. Summerholt is with regards chinese, I am coming to it from the level perhaps of 1st or 2nd year college chinese who can read entry level vernacular texts.

I have an aluratek libre which cannot display chinese fonts, so this is out of the question, but I do my chinese reading mainly on an ipod touch, and the reason for this is (and not really to put a shameless plug) because of the availability of the progam Pleco (which is IMHO, the best chinese learning dictionary out there for native English speakers). I can download chinese texts from throughout the web, display it on Pleco's document reader, and get instant point and pop-up English definitions. Also it has the excellent hanwang handwriting recognition that makes it easy to look up chinese words.

Again I don't know if this helps in the discussion, but I just want to put it out there for folks who are just learning Chinese as an alternative chinese ereader option.

[GA Russell]

Sylver, I have a jetBook Lite, which is the same hardware as a Dr. Yi, and I can say that your comment that the TFT screen drains the battery too quickly is way off base.

I need to change out my batteries only once every two weeks.

LD Boblo has already dealt with your mistaken impression that the TFT screen is backlit.

[Sylver]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

Sylver, I have a jetBook Lite, which is the same hardware as a Dr. Yi, and I can say that your comment that the TFT screen drains the battery too quickly is way off base.

I need to change out my batteries only once every two weeks.

LD Boblo has already dealt with your mistaken impression that the TFT screen is backlit.

what can I say? the link you provided yourself says "Maximum battery life: up to 22 hours", I guess it depends on usage, but given the specs of the TFT screen and how it is implemented, I think it's not that way off to say the battery on Dr. Yi will drain much much more quickly than an e-ink screen, obviously, depending on your usage, your mileage may vary.

[summerholt]

Thanks for all the replies. My Chinese is pretty good. I just need an e-ink ereader to read Chinese. I still don't understand about embedded pdf. Can nook read any Chinese pdf without me doing anything? Is there any other choices, other than ezreader and nook? Can the new kobo read Chinese?

Thanks!

[Sylver]

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.

[summerholt]

Thank you Sylver! I will try it out on my sony.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by Sylver

...I think it's not that way off to say the battery on Dr. Yi will drain much much more quickly than an e-ink screen, obviously, depending on your usage, your mileage may vary.

I gather that it is common for a TFT device to need to be recharged once every two weeks, while an eInk device can go nearly a month without a recharge. As you say, it depends upon your usage.

I agree with the guys who say that in a world where we charge our cell phones each night and our iPods almost as often, under normal circumstances it doesn't matter whether one's reading device can go two, three or four weeks without a charge.

[ebookapps]

Hi all, we just released a chinese fonts support for alternative firmware for Sony eReaders. This version is downloadable from http://www.ebookapplications.com

[greenapple]

iRiver Story and Hanlin ereaders support Chinese natively, so you might want to have a look at those.

[Logseman]

Pocketbook readers do support Chinese, according to the company. More variety to your choice

[summerholt]

Originally Posted by ebookapps

Hi all, we just released a chinese fonts support for alternative firmware for Sony eReaders. This version is downloadable from http://www.ebookapplications.com

That's very helpful! I bought an ezreader myself but I recommended your software to a friend who has a sony505. She loves it! Thanks!

[Nathanael]

Originally Posted by Sylver

The android unicode fonts come with the nook look very good in Chinese novels

Out of curiosity, where do you get Chinese ebooks in Unicode? The libraries I frequent here in Shanghai use GB (Big5 for Traditional). Ditto for Chinese websites (Alibaba, Baidu, Baiyun.net). Unicode seems conspicuous in Asia only by its absence.

--Nathanael

[whiz16]

actually you can flash the prs300 to read chinese. then you dun need to buy any other reader since ur satisfy with the current one.

http://www.hi-pda.com/forum/viewthre...extra=page%3D1

[Sylver]

Originally Posted by Nathanael

Out of curiosity, where do you get Chinese ebooks in Unicode? The libraries I frequent here in Shanghai use GB (Big5 for Traditional). Ditto for Chinese websites (Alibaba, Baidu, Baiyun.net). Unicode seems conspicuous in Asia only by its absence.

--Nathanael

Yes, I always use UltraEdit to convert the text to unicode, 'cause I cannot always be sure which encoding the downloaded file is in. Most stuff I downloaded are in txt format, but again, it could be in GB or Big5 or UTF-8, I always open it in UltraEdit and choose convert UTF-8 (unicode editing) if the option is enabled in the menu.

[Polyglot27]

I have a Cybook Gen 3, and with the latest version 1.6 upgrade it will show Chinese titles on the library pages. You will have to add a Chinese font to the font folder though, and I have given detailed instructions on how to change non-Unicode texts to Unicode and convert to MobiPocket format elsewhere on this forum.