Chinese support for A1000

[Shunora]

I have tired ISILO 4.27 or 4.26 beta for Symbian UIQ on my Motorola A1000 smartphone and have a serious problem. ISILO couldn’t display any Traditional Chinese fonts on my phone, no matter what type of encoding method I choose (I tried them all, include BIG5: Traditional Chinese).
I read through your forum, FAQ and Manual, still couldn’t find any solution on this issue. Please help me to solve this problem before I purchase your product.

By the way, my Motorola A1000 supports both English and Chinese (traditional and simplied) display, and I can view the same ebook with “ReadM” (another ebook software for UIQ) on my phone, so I don’t think it’s the problem of either my phone or my ebook.

I love the interface of ISILO and really want this software, please help.
Thank you.

[iSilo]

You probably need to select the Chinese font.

Let's see what fonts you have on your device. While viewing a document, go to the Edit menu and select Options, which gives you the Options screen. In the drop-down list in the title bar, select Font. In your reply, please list all the fonts shown in the Font to use field.

[Shunora]

For the "Font to use" field, i have the following 5 choice in my phone:-
Calfonts, Chinese Keyboard, Dialer, mcfont, Symbian Viking.

I tried all of them, but still cant view it. Do I need to install any new fonts? If yes, where can i find them? Thank you.

Thanks for the fast reply.

[iSilo]

Let's try changing all the font families to use the Symbian Viking font.
In Options/Font do the following eight steps in order:

1. In Family name select Default
2. In Font to use select Symbian Viking
3. In Family name select Serif
4. In Font to use select Symbian Viking
5. In Family name select Sans serif
6. In Font to use select Symbian Viking
7. In Family name select Monospace
8. In Font to use select Symbian Viking

Then tap Done.

If setting all the Font Families to use Symbian Viking does not work, try setting them all to one of the other fonts (Calfonts, mcfonts, etc.).

Please let us know which font works.

[Shunora]

I followed your steps and changed all the font families to Symbian vikings, however still couldnt display chinese fonts. I also tried to use other fonts, but no use at all.

Any other suggestions?
Thank you.

[iSilo]

The issue then is that your device does not have built-in support for transcoding from Big5 to the native Unicode that the device requires. iSilo does not itself have built-in transcoding support for Big5 to Unicode and relies on the device capabilities for this.

If you converted the content yourself using iSiloX, then you can set the output encoding to Unicode (UTF-8).

To change the output encoding for an entry you created in iSiloX for conversion of a document, do this:

Right-click the entry to get the context menu.
In the context menu, click Properties. This gives you the Properties dialog for the entry.
In the Properties dialog, click the Document tab.
On the Document tab, click Text Encoding Options. This gives you the Text Encoding dialog.
In the Text Encoding dialog, set the Output document text encoding to Unicode (UTF-8).
Click OK to accept the changes in the Text Encoding dialog.
Click OK to accept the changes in the Properties dialog.
After doing the above, reconvert.

If you have .pdb files in Palm Doc format, then you can also use iSiloX to convert them to iSilo format. You will of course need to specify the source encoding to Big5 in the Text Encoding dialog.

[timho]

Hi, just tried to redo the conversion to unicode. My A1000 can finally read the chinese words without any trouble. I found that iSilo won't be able to display the chinese properly unless I change all the fonts to the chinese font library explicitly.

However, iSilo still can't display the "title" of the document if it is in chinese. :confused:

why?

I have attached the chinese bible book "Song of Songs". ISilo displays the chinese contents perfectly but can't display the document title properly. :mad:

Tim

[iSilo]

The title should only use Western character set characters (e.g., Windows-1252). There is currently no generalized encoding support for the title.

[timho]

What about the bookmarks? Do they support Chinese unicode?

Tim

[iSilo]

Internally, they do, but due to iSilo using a standard list box to display the bookmarks, they may not display correctly.

[timho]

Will the next version support this?

[iSilo]

No, it will not, but it is of course under consideration for the future.