Comments on: Sony Reader PRS-505 review (on Mac OS X)

By: Lalita

Lalita — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:36:25 +0000

Hi Graham,

I just read your post about the Esperanto characters. I have just bought the reader and the books I read have roman translitertion of sanskirit so it looks like this:
yaṁ hi na vyathayanty ete puruṣaṁ puruṣarsabha sama-duḥkha-sukhaṁ dhīraṁ so ’mṛtatvāya kalpate

What would I have to do for the reader to recognise the special charecters. Would using the PrsCustomizer and selecting unicode solve the problem. Or will I have to add additional fonts? I am scare of adding additional fonts incase I brick it.

Thanks

Lalita

By: Pen

Pen — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:30:22 +0000

Bone, aliaj esperantistoj kun e-libroj havas saman problemon! Mi ne estas sola…

(Good, other Esperantists with e-books have the same problem! I am not alone…)

By: graham

graham — Sat, 09 May 2009 21:56:08 +0000

Hey Chuck,

Good news! I managed to get the Esperanto characters to correctly display on the Reader.

It turns out that something strange seems to happen during the Calibre conversion process which corrupts the special unicode characters in the resulting ePub / LRF files. If you simply use UTF-8 encoded TXT or RTF files directly with the Reader without conversion the characters display without any trouble.

You’ll have to flash the Reader with PrsCustomizer using the “Unicode” font option to add support for the additional Latin characters beforehand.

If you’ve any problems getting this to work just leave a message here and I’ll run through the complete procedure with you.

Cheers,

…graham.

By: admin

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:25:53 +0000

Hi Graham,

I spent about 2-3 hours trying to hack it, but never managed to get it to work. Sad really

Chuck

By: graham

graham — Fri, 08 May 2009 09:31:32 +0000

Hey Chuck,

Just wondering if you ever managed to get Esperanto specific characters to display correctly on the reader without embedding them in a pdf etc.?

I’ve tried using PRSC to flash the reader using the unicode font support ( and the custom font support with a DejaVu ttf ) but to no avail.

It seems that no matter what I try the Reader simply refuses to display ĉ, ĵ, ĥ, ĵ etc. merely replacing them with a “?” character. I don’t suppose you managed to crack the problem?

…graham.

By: Chuck Smith

Chuck Smith — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:12:46 +0000

Hi Anon,

I also wrote up a whole post on using Calibre with the Sony Reader. You’re right, it’s awesome! http://www.chucksmith.de/?p=131

As for the IM spam, are you sure it came from posting on my blog? In any case, I hope it wasn’t too annoying.

By: Anon

Anon — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:37:05 +0000

Also, leaving a message on your website got me IM spam in 20 seconds. GG.

By: Anon

Anon — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:25:37 +0000

If you want to use any file you’ve dl’d with your Reader check out Calibre, a free, open source porter. It takes a little finangling but it’s worth it.

http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/download_osx

By: Chuck Smith

Chuck Smith — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:14:51 +0000

I’ve read some of the iPhone SDK Application Development and it works pretty well. The worst part is that the example source code occasionally goes off the screen, so you can’t read it. I’ll send you pictures by email.

By: Nina

Nina — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:51:43 +0000

Hey Chuck,

thanks for the article, most of it sounded familiar to me after re:publica
Still have one question, though: Have you ever tried reading non-fiction ebooks? I’m wondering what images or graphics look like on the Sony Reader… any pictures of that?
Cheers,
Nina