Problem with font or character encoding

[no harmony]

I started reading ebooks on Sony PRS-T1 about a month ago and have problems related to reading Russian books.

When I open a book in FB2 format in Calibre, it correctly displays all characters. When I convert the book to EPUB and send it to PRS-T1, it shows question marks instead of text. By changing font from "Original" to anything else on the list, the Russian text shows up (not all characters though, about that later). Is there a way to have the text displayed correctly from the start, without the change of fonts?

This works fine for most texts, but not for all - see the attached screenshot as seen in Calibre. The second line has two words with special characters, and on Sony eReader it shows question marks for those characters, regardless of font selection. What is the cause of this, and could it be fixed?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by no harmony

I started reading ebooks on Sony PRS-T1 about a month ago and have problems related to reading Russian books.

When I open a book in FB2 format in Calibre, it correctly displays all characters. When I convert the book to EPUB and send it to PRS-T1, it shows question marks instead of text. By changing font from "Original" to anything else on the list, the Russian text shows up (not all characters though, about that later). Is there a way to have the text displayed correctly from the start, without the change of fonts?

This works fine for most texts, but not for all - see the attached screenshot as seen in Calibre. The second line has two words with special characters, and on Sony eReader it shows question marks for those characters, regardless of font selection. What is the cause of this, and could it be fixed?

The Sony does not have that character available in THE SONY font set. There may be a way to add character sets (overall) to the Sony (check the Sony forum) or you need to embed the proper set in each book.

I recently had a book (UTF-8) that looked great in Calibre/Sigil/EPUBReader and had the ? mark in ADE on my PEz.
Painfully tracking it down (with a HEX editor), I found it was (U) E29CA5
Now I will have to learn how to add custom (limited characters) font sets

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by no harmony

By changing font from "Original" to anything else on the list, the Russian text shows up (not all characters though, about that later). Is there a way to have the text displayed correctly from the start, without the change of fonts?

The extra fonts on the T1 (Amasis etc) have a fuller range of characters than the 'Original' T1 default.

If the extra fonts still don't contain all the chars you need, the only way (so far) to fix the epub on the T1 is to:

• Identify a font-family with all the characters needed for your chosen reading language
• Learn how to fully embed these fonts into each and every epub on your T1.

If you do this then your new embedded font will display correctly when you have Menu - Font - Selected Font Type set to Original.

If you're not sure how to fully embed a font in an epub this post may help. The example uses Gentium Book Basic but you can amend it for any font-family of your choice.