sort of English Duokan

[reprep]

i can't post screenshots now but i too have some observations.

I read Turkish books a lot. And the different characters of Turkish from ASCII are
(ı,İ,ü,Ğ,ğ,ç,Ç,ö). Duokan can only display ü from those characters and it is shown weird. for example the text was in italic but "ü" wasn't in italic.

Duokan just omitted the other special characters. for example "akşam" is shown as "akam". I only used the normal documents folder not DK_Documents

I can live with not reading my turkish documents in duokan but the space after apostrophe makes my english books unreadable too. If that problem is solved, i will use it as my main firmware. Speed of going to the next page is unbelievable and it supports a lot of formats as a bonus

But for now the only advantage of duokan is pdf viewing. I will try to launch its pdf viewer from launchpad when i get my hands on my new kindle dx.

[FethryDuck]

well, I was very surprised about the results I wrote about in my last posting. Could they really have a different coding based on what folder the text is stored in ?

@reprep: - I did not know about Turkish, and include a link here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...ish_characters

My view and hope has been that books/dictionaries would both handle utf-8, which does not seem possible with Turkish language. We are somewhat at the heart of some of the Duokan mess, as they attempt a larger code-base. 16bits seem to be needed for Turkish, which is also the issue with Duokan. ( uncertain what they attempt doing at the moment )

Turkish will need a separate character encoder, for ISO 8859-9, or include some exceptions as described in the link. Maybe GB18030 will handle it in the future ?

[reprep]

well i don't have much info about character encodings. I think ISO 8859-9 known as Latin-5 is fine for Turkish and it is a 8 bit character encoding as far as i know.

[FethryDuck]

Originally Posted by reprep

well i don't have much info about character encodings. I think ISO 8859-9 known as Latin-5 is fine for Turkish and it is a 8 bit character encoding as far as i know.

Correct.

Now, I am not sure what Duokan attempt doing, but their character coding fail and will not work with the dictionaries unless the coding is utf-8, which also is what most books are using. The older ISO 8859 are rarely used anymore and Turkish seem to pose some added difficulties. This has to do with uppercase dotted "I", lowercase dotless "i", etc. Turkish-English dictionary did seem to exist in Stardict. I would think some of that would cause trouble.

However, dictionaries does not work in Duokan for similar reasons. Example, looking up "akşam" would fail if it dropped the middle character, right ?

[reprep]

yes "akşam" would fall to "akam" i guess though i have never used a dictionary in duokan. I have a turkish-english dictionary working perfectly well (with all the characters we have been talking about) for the original amazon firmware for kindle 3.1.

But i heard it is giving trouble for kindle dx and kindle 2.

I am getting a kindle dx next week and i have a lot of turkish books. I will have difficulties even on original firmware if i am not wrong. I guess unicode font hacking will be the solution for me.

what does 2.5.8 firmware fonts use for character encoding (for kindle dx and kindle 2) and what does 3.1 use?

we should let the duokan guys know this problem if they are not already aware. Is there anyone around here who knows chinese?

[thomass]

http://duokan.com/forum/thread-4742-1-3.html

[reprep]

well this problem has been reported more than 6 months ago according to that thread, and i think it would already be fixed if the solution was easy.

I guess i will have to stick to the original firmware for longer than i had hoped.

[FethryDuck]

Version Number: 0.5.13.8942 Beta0520.rar
Suitable models: Kindle 2, kindle3 , kindleDX , Kindle DXG
File size: 46MB
Updated Time : 2011.5.20

download:
http://dl.dbank.com/c06iq92lj7

Description:

Bugfix :
The Amendment 1 zip in the picture, click twice back home and click crash ( tonnyfly provide)

[FethryDuck]

Originally Posted by reprep

I have a turkish-english dictionary working perfectly well (with all the characters we have been talking about) for the original amazon firmware for kindle 3.1.
But i heard it is giving trouble for kindle dx and kindle 2.

Can that differentiate between the different "i" ? This is one problem which 8 bit unicode don't seem able to address ?

Originally Posted by reprep

we should let the duokan guys know this problem if they are not already aware. Is there anyone around here who knows chinese?

I have a more then a dozen bug-reports in their "bugzilla" on these issues, for several languages - and the Turkish issue is now included.

However - the German umlauts as well as characters in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, French, Portogese, Spanish, Italian ... has mostly been fixed for utf-8 text files.
( read earlier postings in this thread ) However, their implementation cause conflicts with dictionaries, something I hope will be corrected.

Text files are the easiest, and the hope is that these solutions will migrate to the other formats. ( some have other ways this is corrected.. ) In other words, there has been a steady progress in .txt documents.

Most formats can be converted to utf-8 text files, and in many cases the results are good. This may be done with many programs, iconv, calibre, web based applications, scripts, etc. Simple scripts may do the job as well. But, this is of course not how it should be.

[reprep]

I don't have my kindle with me now so i can't check but if i don't remember wrong there wasn't a problem with "ı" and "İ". The dictionary was in mobi format and there was words beginning with "İ" and words containing the letter "ı". The dictionary doesn't have to convert the lowercase to uppercase or vice versa so i couldn't understand why you especially wondered about "i" and "I".

Thanks for the bug report by the way.

It will be a bit off-topic but some guys are profiting from duokan and selling it as Kindle OS X 4.1 for 4.99 bucks. I guess duokan guys are already aware of this but if they are not it would be good if somebody told them.

[Hador]

could someone provide a mirror for the duokan releases? I don't seem to be able to download from dbank (transfer speeds are painfully low, most of the time I'm not even getting in the Kbs).

Thanks in advance,
H.

[thomass]

Originally Posted by FethryDuck

I have a more then a dozen bug-reports in their "bugzilla" on these issues, for several languages - and the Turkish issue is now included.

thanks

[FethryDuck]

Originally Posted by reprep

I don't have my kindle with me now so i can't check but if i don't remember wrong there wasn't a problem with "ı" and "İ". The dictionary was in mobi format and there was words beginning with "İ" and words containing the letter "ı". The dictionary doesn't have to convert the lowercase to uppercase or vice versa so i couldn't understand why you especially wondered about "i" and "I".

Thanks for the bug report by the way.

It will be a bit off-topic but some guys are profiting from duokan and selling it as Kindle OS X 4.1 for 4.99 bucks. I guess duokan guys are already aware of this but if they are not it would be good if somebody told them.

1. - read a story about uppercase/lowercase issues that happens in utf-8, which explained it would need utf-16 for that reason. Checked and found there was some existing Stardict dictionary, which all uses utf-8. In Stardict, you can make your own dictionaries and much is made by volunteers.

2. - you are welcome. It has been difficult to keep any dialog with anyone. Perhaps it is some cultural thing, - I don't know. Anyway, they have done efforts to solve several issues and they did make character corrections for those we have found. But it has been slow, as their focus were to solve other issues first.

3. - no, I did not know !
http://kindleos.com/

[FethryDuck]

Originally Posted by Hador

could someone provide a mirror for the duokan releases? I don't seem to be able to download from dbank (transfer speeds are painfully low, most of the time I'm not even getting in the Kbs).

Thanks in advance,
H.

yes, they can be slow. It seem to depend on how many attempt to download at the same time, which mostly happen right after a new release.

Not sure how often he updates, but ...
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...0&postcount=10

[reprep]

anyone got the changelog for the 5/20 version?