Unicode Font support without flashing

[tasoskaf]

Does anybody knows where can i find customized greek fonts??

[pepak]

Originally Posted by alanine

2. put your customized Unicode font files in FONT directory (three files tt0003m_.ttf,tt0011m_.ttf,tt0419m_.ttf, with the font family name "Swis721 BT", "Dutch801 Rm BT", and "Courier10 BT" respectively, basically the same as you would do with a prs-500).

I admit I am a font newbie - I just use Times, Courier, Arial and Verdana supplied with my Windows and that about completes my knowledge of fonts . So my questions will be pretty basic:

1) How do I find a font with family name "Swis721 BT" (and the other two)?
2) Are fonts included with Windows XP Unicode or not? And if they are not, where would one look for unicode fonts? I am using Czech (East European) Windows.

[electristan]

Originally Posted by pepak

I admit I am a font newbie - I just use Times, Courier, Arial and Verdana supplied with my Windows and that about completes my knowledge of fonts . So my questions will be pretty basic:

1) How do I find a font with family name "Swis721 BT" (and the other two)?
2) Are fonts included with Windows XP Unicode or not? And if they are not, where would one look for unicode fonts? I am using Czech (East European) Windows.

for number 1 see my post here. i had to use a tool called FontCreator it let me change the font family. hope it helps

[pepak]

Originally Posted by electristan

for number 1 see my post here. i had to use a tool called FontCreator it let me change the font family. hope it helps

Not quite. I take it that I am supposed to modify the font data so that the font family field contains "Swis721 BT" instead of the original "Whatever123 XY"?

[electristan]

Originally Posted by pepak

Not quite. I take it that I am supposed to modify the font data so that the font family field contains "Swis721 BT" instead of the original "Whatever123 XY"?

Exactly, you can do this with the software mentioned. Just open the font, go to "Tools => AutoNaming..." and follow the instructions. After that just save the modified font and all will be well.

Nice and easy

[pepak]

For some strange reason I can't get it to work. I used FontMapper to modify standard Windows' Courier, Times and Verdana to the font families mentioned in the first post and renamed the files accordingly.Then I copied them and the fontmapper files to the SD card. This is what my directory structure contains:

K:\libfskLoad.so
K:\myvm2.xml
K:\FONT\tt0003m_.ttf
K:\FONT\tt0011m_.ttf
K:\FONT\tt0419m_.ttf
K:\Sony Reader\software\autorun.js
K:\Sony Reader\software\autorun.xml

When I started up the reader, it asked me whether I want to activate the script. I pressed "1" to do so and almost immediately I got an error message:

Run script
PRS-505 FONT MAPPER
mouting FONT directory failed.
MENU: exit

(yep, there's missing "n" in"mounting")

The card is formatted as FAT16 (I even reformatted it to make sure). I copied all files using my favorite file manager and I took care to keep font cases as described in the first post.

The good news is that no data got deleted from either the internal memory or the SD card.

Any idea what's wrong?

[electristan]

I think the problem is that you have

\FONT\tt0003m_.ttf
\FONT\tt0011m_.ttf
\FONT\tt0419m_.ttf

on your SD card, they should be on your reader.

[pepak]

Cool! It apparently worked - the menu font is all different now. Thanks a lot for your help!

[electristan]

no problem, I've been helped sp many times on these forums i thought it was my time to try

[Guesser]

This font hack worked for me. I'm having trouble with calibre after it though.

I did the font hack, then I copied a Chinese LRF ebook to it (which also has a Chinese title - not sure if that matters) using the Sony Connect software. The book works fine - the Chinese text appears properly in the menus, and the book's Chinese text is also fine. When I try connecting the reader via USB with calibre running however, I get the following error with no SD card inserted:

ExpatError: mismatched tag: line 50, column 1948
Failed to perform job: Get metadata from device
Further device related error messages will not be shown while this message is visible.
Detailed traceback:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/calibre/gui2/jobs.py", line 64, in run
  File "build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/calibre/gui2/device.py", line 81, in books
  File "build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/calibre/devices/prs505/driver.py", line 293, in books
  File "build/bdist.linux-i686/egg/calibre/devices/prs505/books.py", line 134, in __init__
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/xml/dom/minidom.py", line 1915, in parse
    return expatbuilder.parse(file)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 928, in parse
    result = builder.parseFile(file)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 207, in parseFile
    parser.Parse(buffer, 0)
ExpatError: mismatched tag: line 50, column 1948

.. and then after trying it again with a blank SD card inserted, I get a corrupt database error instead (which suggests deleting media.xml, etc.).

After erasing the media.xml and resetting my reader with a soft reset (which apparently killed the font hack, since the Chinese text turned into boxes), it worked fine. Then after re-applying the hack, I get the error. Not sure if it matters, but this is running calibre in Ubuntu 8.04.

[alanine]

Guesser, it's probably a problem caused by the "dirty" remount this hack is using. It'll mess up the filesystem if subsequent write (e.g., use Sony Connect software to update book database on the 505) is performed. So I suggest you only apply the hack after you are done with copying new books. To be really safe, each time you connect 505 to PC, do a soft reset first to clear the effect of this hack.

The reason why Calibre fails on the PC end is beyond me, but I suspect it's related this hack. Probably someone could patch Calibre to work again in this situation. As I don't use it (and I no long have a 505), I can't suggest a fix. Sorry!

I recommend people using this hack to store all books on a SD card if they use Sony Connect software. This way it'll avoid updating 505's internal mem when updating book databases. So there'll be no danger of corrupting meta files or having the 505 to re-format LRFs, which is a milliion times slower than the PC.

[pubolab]

Originally Posted by alanine

Only problem is that the mkdosfs thing may have done some damage to the partition table of /Data,

Where does tinyhttp.sh reside in the reader's file system?

Maybe can temporarily "mount --bind" the tinyhttp.sh parent directory to some where in the SD card so that you can put a modified tinyhttp.sh there.

After the restart of the tinyhttp, you could then do a "umount" to remove the temporarily binding.

Just an idea, I did not receive my 505 yet.

[atesta]

OK, I used this and it worked... partially. Font were really changed, but the reader is not displaying language-specific characters rightly, BUT IN THE TEXT ONLY. In the menu, characters are displayed correctly.
I used windows default fonts (time news roman, arial, courier) renamed using FontCreator.
Is there any way the font can be displayed corrently in the text itself?

[igorsk]

What books formats did you test it on?

[atesta]

Plain text, .txt