oh, criminy... (lit to imp)

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

not enough room in what ? do you mean the internal memory ? would the special characters really take up that much space ? wouldn't it just be a matter of integrating a more complete font ? Times New Roman and Arial contain probably every glyph you could imagine (and more !) but the font file is only a few kb ; shouldn't that be enough ? what else do you need to support the glyphs, apart from a fontface which contains them ?

anyway if that's the case and it's impossible to update the eb1150 / 1200 to support these glyphs, then i really hope they make these changes in the next versions, and that the next versions become available soon.

it would be nice if they could support unconverted html and /or mobi as well in the next versions (although i don't get the impression this is necessarily in their plans) ; both of these had no trouble displaying this file, and the html got the formatting right on the first try, too. not to mention how much easier it would be to just slide an html file onto the memory card, without worrying about conversion, end formats, etc... and, when you found an ocr mistake in the PG book you were reading, you could just correct it in the original html file, and transfer the new copy over ! so simple.

You mean correct it on the device itself? That is the only way to make it simple.

Dale

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

not enough room in what ? do you mean the internal memory ? would the special characters really take up that much space ? wouldn't it just be a matter of integrating a more complete font ? Times New Roman and Arial contain probably every glyph you could imagine (and more !) but the font file is only a few kb ; shouldn't that be enough ? what else do you need to support the glyphs, apart from a fontface which contains them ?

anyway if that's the case and it's impossible to update the eb1150 / 1200 to support these glyphs, then i really hope they make these changes in the next versions, and that the next versions become available soon.

it would be nice if they could support unconverted html and /or mobi as well in the next versions (although i don't get the impression this is necessarily in their plans) ; both of these had no trouble displaying this file, and the html got the formatting right on the first try, too. not to mention how much easier it would be to just slide an html file onto the memory card, without worrying about conversion, end formats, etc... and, when you found an ocr mistake in the PG book you were reading, you could just correct it in the original html file, and transfer the new copy over ! so simple.

Fonts are in ROM and they take up more room than you might think after taking car of bold, italics, bold italic, normal and all the special characters. UTF-8 is about 100K characters. I am not aware of any font that has them all.

Dale

[zelda_pinwheel]

no, i think correcting the file on the device would probably be too complex for the interface of a device like this (i mean, in any more permanent way than marking it with the stylus... you know, i never thought i would really use the touchscreen, but for things like that it's invaluable), not to mention the file system.

however, now, when i have corrections to make in a text, i must first correct my original html file, then re-build a new imp file. the imp format is closed, so if i notice a mistake i did not fix before launching the build, or if i keep reading and find new mistakes, i must launch a *new* build, and wait for it to process again... it might seem like a small step but i really think it would make a big difference in ease of use to support html natively. and since imp is based on html, it seems like it shouldn't be very hard.

html is a good basic format for text ; you can do a lot with a few css rules, it's robust, easy to use, reflowable, supports hyper-links, completely open, very common... imagine what it would mean, if you could take any html file and read it *with not further conversion necessary*. it would be brilliant !

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Fonts are in ROM and they take up more room than you might think after taking car of bold, italics, bold italic, normal and all the special characters. UTF-8 is about 100K characters. I am not aware of any font that has them all.

Dale

they don't take up *that* much space... as an example, i looked at 2 fonts : Times New Roman (this is the font used by firefox to display the book with the phonetic glyphs, and i know it is a very complete fontface as far as glyphs go), and Avenir.

Times New Roman Fontface has 7 variant fonts in it. each file is only around 35ko, and all together they weigh 243 ko.

Avenir must have fewer glyphs, because an individual font file only weighs around 29ko, however there are 12 variants, and altogether (all 12 of them !) they weigh only 330ko !!

how much (or how little...) rom can these things really have, that they can't spare a few hundred ko for a decent typeface ? especially since in these devices, i think we only really need 4 variants : regular, bold, italic, and bold italic. taking Times as an example, that's only 137ko !

i imagine we could not support every glyph known to man (like, maybe we couldn't have arabic fonts on there, or japanese kana), and i don't know exactly what is encompassed by UTF-8 or whether that charset is necessary / good / better, but as i say, with Times New Roman alone the most "common among the uncommon" would definitely be covered, including all accented characters found in european languages and (as demonstrated) the characters necessary for transcribing phonetic spellings. this seems like a pretty good start to me, and i don't see why it could not be possible. plus, the serif font on there right now is kinda clunky. it would be nice to have a different one.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Fonts are in ROM and they take up more room than you might think after taking car of bold, italics, bold italic, normal and all the special characters. UTF-8 is about 100K characters. I am not aware of any font that has them all.

Dale

I remember seeing this about fonts in the REB 1200 firmware and since the publishing tools are the same for the EBW 1150, this *should* also apply to the EBW 1150.

Source: http://www.chromakinetics.com/REB1200/hardware.htm

Does the Epson chip display the fonts or are the fonts for serif, san-serif, etc in the flash memory? I am specifically interested in the font metrics as that is needed to calculate line and page breaks.

The required font metrics are all stored in the publishing tools (if the publishing tools can paginate the data, they would have to be). A person knowledgeable in the .RES folder format (such as yourself) should be able to pick apart the NFNT data type to find the individual font metrics for each font. All that remains is figuring out the NFNT format (hint: use Google).

All the fonts (and metrics) are stored in the flash in the firmware image. The original fonts are Mac fonts and are then converted to the format we use for the rendering engine. Part of the build process creates the fonts WITH the metrics as data in the firmware. The format is pretty much identical to the NFNT resource format on a Mac. The major difference is that there is no FOND resource to describe families, that's all done by resource ID.

The font data is ALSO in the publishing tools, as the line and page breaks are calculated by the tools when you build the books. The book doesn't have any real clue how wide lines are, it just knows where to put things and when to break lines (all set by the tools). In other words, it might be possible to extract that info from the freely available publishing tools (rather than trying to pull it from the ROMs).

The only change to the fonts in the 5 years I worked on the product was the addition of the Euro character in the end of 2002. I think firmware earlier than 3.2 is missing the Euro character in some fonts.

If anybody out there ever wants tools for manipulating early Mac OS NFNT resources, let me know. I wrote utilities to dump the font characters to images, and then recombine those images later. For doing the Euro update, I dumped everything to images, edited them in Photoshop and recombined them. The original fonts were created using a program called Fontastic which only ran on very early versions of the Mac OS (pre 6.0), needless to say I needed to find a better way when I did the update. From: Erik Walter < ebook@e... >

Just a note that the REB 1200 firmware was 3.3 BEFORE ETI took over; now we are at firmware 4.22.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by nrapallo

I remember seeing this about fonts in the REB 1200 firmware and since the publishing tools are the same for the EBW 1150, this *should* also apply to the EBW 1150.



Just a note that the REB 1200 firmware was 3.3 BEFORE ETI took over; now we are at firmware 4.22.

Very interesting information, particularly about how the metrics are done. I may have to do a little more research Of course it doesn't change the fact that a ROM change is needed to implement any additional fonts. As you know there are only 3 font sets in this unit and only one of them is completely supported. I can expect the reason that the other two are so sparse is the lack of room.

Dale

[zelda_pinwheel]

thanks Nick for that info, very interesting. i'm not sure i've understood it all completely, i will have to read it again more sowly (and maybe do a bit of resesarch on google ).

but if i've understood the basic situation, it means that we would need an update to the firmware AND to eBook Publisher, to incorporate new fonts ? this is what it sounded like to me. but i also noticed that since ETI has taken over, there *have* been updates to the firmware in the past (from 3.3 tp 4.22 !) so maybe it's not completely hopeless after all... fingers crossed... out of curiosity, is there any way to know how much ROM the firmware occupies currently, and how much is available total ? i've never seen any way to take a look at the OS, since even when i connect the USB cable i don't seem to have access to anything via windows.

alternately, is this by any chance the sort of thing that someone who knows a bit about programming would be able to acheive (i mean, adding a font to the firmware, and / or creating a hack for Publisher to add character support) ? don't jump out of your chair if it's a completely ridiculous notion, i really have no idea what would be involved !! i know flashing a firmware (if it's like flashing a BIOS) is a delicate and potentially dangerous operation so i would not want to undertake it in sketchy circumstances, but i really am curious to know what exactly would be involved and how complex it would be. (i've never flashed anything so far, at least not intentionally... )

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

...alternately, is this by any chance the sort of thing that someone who knows a bit about programming would be able to acheive (i mean, adding a font to the firmware, and / or creating a hack for Publisher to add character support) ? don't jump out of your chair if it's a completely ridiculous notion, i really have no idea what would be involved !! i know flashing a firmware (if it's like flashing a BIOS) is a delicate and potentially dangerous operation so i would not want to undertake it in sketchy circumstances, but i really am curious to know what exactly would be involved and how complex it would be. (i've never flashed anything so far, at least not intentionally... )

The Russian site http://www.the-ebook.org/ has a lot of information about this topic.

For including Russian fonts on the REB 1200, go to AltaVista Babel Fish Translation http://babelfish.altavista.com/ and Translate a Web page using http://www.the-ebook.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4453 . Choose to translate from 'Russian to English'.

Below are two important announcements concerning the REB 1200 (as translated by Babel Fish):

As posted by Goldy on Jul 29, 2006:

Good day!!!

Already yr as I am the happy owner this device.

From the very beginning was the thought to poprobyvat' Russianize it, but in connection with the absence of time and information on this question the matter was put aside into the long box. Being now located in the leave dug out koy what information on this question of which I want to share with people.

For the experiments it was undertaken the files of piercing to REB 1200 politely lined radugaif. Basic input-output system Itself is assembled from these 2- X it is file by alternating the even and odd words.

After assembling of the file of bios after long attempts it was possible to find types located in the bios. In all it was possible to find 40 it was type they all are stored in size NFNT. of them were experimentally found 2 which they are used in the regime of reading (large and small type).

As a result of a study these 2- X are type they explained that they contain alphabet beginning from 33 through 255 symbol. In printsype symbols from 192 through 255 can be used for the russification in coding Win of 1251, since there it is contained in essence of pseudo-graph. The sizes of 1 types 15x15, 2 - GO 20x19. sole and very serious limitation in the fact that the length at points from 192 symbols to 255 composes only of 347 points in small type and 582 points in the large. Accordingly if we subdivide 347/64 (quantity of symbols) that to the letter priydetsya less than 6 points on the width.

This constraint is associated with the fact that it is not possible to change the size of the file of type, since this connected with the alteration of all cross references in the bios to otsledit' which is impossible.

2 version to carry there not all symbols, but only those symbols which do not have analogs in the English alphabet.

3 version to carry Russian symbols into another place for example with 128, etc.

It would be desirable to know your thoughts on this occasion, and also thoughts of author BookDesigner about the possibility of the alteration of program for the work with Russian type.

The large request radugaif to share with information apropos of piercing (what programmer is necessary, the description of process itself, etc.).

With the respect Dmitriy.

As posted by Goldy on Feb 09, 2008:

As it promised I previously lay out the Russianized version of piercing for REB 1200.
(on Friday satisfactorily it were completed epic with the repair of book Very Happy )

Today, after yesterday's holiday, finally that was possible to protestirovat' new piercing with types, ruzul'tat completely satisfactory, however some happy fellows I hope and themselves can of this be convinced.

For the piercing was used the version of ya_2_.22f types Times New Roman.
Reference to the archive with the piercings is given below.
*** link removed ***

Briefly about the content of the archive:
- folder ForVer2 - contains files for vladel'tsov of 2 versions of the piercing (on this version this method like it works)

- folder ForVer?ndHiger - contains files for the owners of version 3 and above (I do not know it will work this method with this version, to pokrayney measure in the owners of version 2 after pereproshivki it no longer it worked )

- folder PatchedCrcVer4_2_22 - for the owners of version 2 only after the installation of piercing from folder ForVer2 for the correction the check sum (in version 2 it was another algorithm of calculation CRC), for the owners of version 3 or above it does not be required.

- PubUtils - contains that modified dll with Russian types (necessary to replace in the catalog with BookDesigner without having forgotten to preserve old). After which it is possible to load what nibud' book, to isolate the piece of text and to change the size of type Menu->.Configuration->.Fonts to select font size - > medium. After this, Menu->.Make->.Ebooks->.Reb 1200... (Imp) to forego much lingual support (No) and to trace so that would be set the bird show preview after which harvest make book.

- RusFonts - contains strictly the collection of Russians it is type adapted with the russification, size RBF - editor RBFEditor. (in the author was some door posts in the program; therefore in separate types can be observed the breaks between the letters, 4 like it corrected that it was, but on to 100% it were not confident)

Installation of the piercing: We throw into root of CF of map all files from the necessary folder, we load without forgetting to hold to the pressed key for paging through to the right.

Attention!!! After the installation of piercing not in which case one ought not to use the renovation of piercing from EBOOK INC, since in this piercing checkings of check sum, etc. are removed, in the case of the installation of renovation from EBook the work of the obtained algorithm of renovation is not guaranteed and it can be blocked by firm by producer!!!

Obtained problems:
- with the attempt to change the size of type for the entire book on the screen occurs change, and with formation imp of file it remains the old size of type, works a change in type only for the chosen section.

- the index of the book is not Russianized, the graphic mapping of title in the form of picture faster there is used, since in for piercing it was impossible to find analogous type.

- the size of the book in BookDesigner is obtained 2 times of more than file txt because of use Unicode of symbols with the formation.

- the name of the author in the Russian in the book shows by krakozyabrami.

On all these questions there was the useless attempt to be connected with the author of program, but my letter of 28 February, so lies at its personal box not not read, can whom nibud' from you will succeed herself in with it being connected.

A lot of good reading here. For the general REB 1100/EBW1150/REB1200 forum, again go to AltaVista Babel Fish Translation http://babelfish.altavista.com/ and Translate a Web page using http://www.the-ebook.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=2 and choose to translate from 'Russian to English'.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

thanks Nick for that info, very interesting. i'm not sure i've understood it all completely, i will have to read it again more sowly (and maybe do a bit of resesarch on google ).

You're welcome!

but if i've understood the basic situation, it means that we would need an update to the firmware AND to eBook Publisher, to incorporate new fonts ? this is what it sounded like to me. but i also noticed that since ETI has taken over, there *have* been updates to the firmware in the past (from 3.3 tp 4.22 !) so maybe it's not completely hopeless after all... fingers crossed... out of curiosity, is there any way to know how much ROM the firmware occupies currently, and how much is available total ? i've never seen any way to take a look at the OS, since even when i connect the USB cable i don't seem to have access to anything via windows.

Yes, the firmware and eBook Publisher .dll would BOTH have to be updated. Per above post, the Russians have updated the firmware to include the Russian alphabet characters not present in the windows-1252 character set and use BookDesigner with their updated PubUtil.dll to map those characters for their use.

So, if they can do it, ETI surley could as well. Filling in the unsupported glyphs should not be a problem, though implementing brand new fonts could be. Just my two cents...