Arabic news

[electromikey]

Is there any way of getting arabic news from places such as Al-Jazeera, BBC News Arabic, Euronews Arabic, etc, onto my sony ebook reader prs 650 through Callibre. I've noticed they have Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese etc, so it should be possible, right?

Can anyone help me out with this/give me some instructions on how i can make it work. I don't mind if it gets a little techincal, as long as the instructions are clear. I would love to be able to download arabic news onto my ebook reader!

Thanks!

[HazRPG]

Hey,

I've been working on an Arabic recipe myself, since I think its bad that there is very little in the ways of news feeds for Arabic readers. I've been working on getting Al-Ahram, an Egyptian news paper company.

However the only problem I'm having is getting the text to be right-to-left (RTL). It works, and the text is still readable - its just a bit strange when the last sentence starts half-way due to it not rendering in RTL (well more specifically, it seems to be left-aligned instead of right-aligned if that makes sense).

If you'd like, I can upload this for you and you can try it and tell me what you think. I do plan on making more Arabic news feeds, because I really need to practice my Arabic reading. I've grown up with Arabic because my mother is Egyptian, however I never really learned to read and write until much later on in life.

Let me know if you'd like to try my recipe. However for now, I'll upload today's news pull in mobi format. Let me know what you think.

Download: http://www.hazrpg.co.uk/tmp/arabic/Al-Ahram.mobi

Regards,
Haz.

P.S. I have spent a fair amount of time to try and cancel a lot of useless stuff from the RSS feeds, e.g. comments at the bottom and other various things. I'm still having trouble getting rid of the Facebook and Twitter links, since those tags on their site don't have labels. Is there another way to get rid of these?

[HazRPG]

Seems I got the URL wrong for the file I uploaded. The URL has been changed .

[electromikey]

Hey thanks for the reply and good luck with the recipe, i need some good arabic news recipes because i'm studying the language and i hate reading off the computer screen, unfortunately i don't really have any idea how to go about doing it.

I tried Al-Ahram on my sony ebook reader but it didn't work, just appeared as a sequence of ???. I had to convert it though, since the sony ebook reader doesn't support mobi so maybe the formatting got lost in the process... Any ideas how to get it working for the sony ebook reader?

It looks great on the computer by the way!

[HazRPG]

Hey, my recipe has been added in the newest version of Calibre under the new Arabic section .

For now I think Arabic isn't supported under most eReaders, so the best way is to make sure Calibre downloads as ePub (it has RTL support)... and convert to PDF before transferring to your Sony eReader. Since it should show the Arabic fine this way.

Hope this helps until we get proper Arabic support on our devices. I shall be making more Arabic recipes, because I think only one option in the menu makes it look lonely. Are there any you'd like me to start work on first? Link me to the sites, and I'll try and get some made for you.

Regards,
Haz

[electromikey]

Genious, thank you so much!!! I downloaded as epub and converted to PDF and it displays perfectly, I'm actually extatic as i've been trying to do this for so long!

I usually read Euronews Arabic or BBC Arabic when i'm online so if you can create something with those websites it would really come in handy

[HazRPG]

I'm glad that worked for you. I was just as excited as you when I first realised that I could have arabic on my device in much the same way.

I'm really busy at the moment with other projects, but once I get some free time... I'll try and make those recipes for you.

Keep on rocking the Calibre. I wish some other people would help me to try and get more Arabic recipes on Calibre though, would be great to see more Arabic spring up in new updates.