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View Full Version : Problem with English .pdb files with a Chinese Enabled device


eschelar
02-12-2006, 06:03 AM
Ok, I have 2 PDA's. One is an Acer n10 with Windows Mobile 2003 1st Ed. with a CHINESE OS. I've been using it for a couple of years and have had registered iSilo for almost that long (since version 4.01 I think).

My other PDA is brand new to me. Fujistu Pocket Loox 720 with VGA and Windows Mobile 2003 2nd Ed. with ENGLISH OS + CE-Star Chinese enabler.

My CE-Star has everything deselected on the installation except the basic package (Chinese Enabling) and the PenPower HWR engine. I have also used Tascal RegEdit to remove CE-Star itself from my Input choices. None of the rest of it works at all. Except for PenPower (which is decent, but not as good as Native Chinese OS HWR), CE-Star is one very poor peice of work.

Both of these devices exhibit the same problem. I had previously thought that this was a memory overload issue, but since have discovered that other non-chinese enabled, similarly spec'd devices do not have the same problem with the same document in iSilo.

My Chinese enabling has to do with me being a casual student of Chinese. I live in Taiwan and have studied Chinese on and off for a couple of years. My spoken Chinese is almost indistinguishable from native speakers, but my reading/writing is still fairly poor. As such, I do not tend to read many files in Chinese, but it is necessary for me because of dictionary functions as well as note-taking which I do use Chinese for quite regularly.

The problem specifically is that when reading .pdb documents in ENGLISH, certain characters will be misinterpreted as Chinese. There is no issue with the chinese characters themselves, but they don't belong there. This is most commonly seen with the apostrophe which totally confuses iSilo, being read as some sort of escape character or something. There are even a couple of areas where some parts of text (all of which appear to be links within the document) become white on white or invisible text. Highlighting the text in copy mode does not appear to reveal anything. The links are not broken and even though I cannot see them, I can tap on them. I would say that a small, but significant portion of my links are affected by this. I do not know why some are affected and others are not. With a multiple section hotlinked table of contents for example, most are unaffected, but two or three whole sections are invisible.

I believe this problem to be font related. I am also having a similar although possibly unrelated problem with CE-Star compatibility with PlecoDict, the author of which has stated this is a problem with CE-Star's end.

CE-Star is totally unresponsive on the issue.

I have personally tried to change fonts within iSilo, but am hesitant to make too many changes as when I did so, it screwed up all of the english fonts terribly on my device, neither soft reset, nor restoring a backup would fix it. I needed to actually hard reset, then restore.

I would like to know if anyone else has come across this issue or perhaps has some ideas on how to fix this. Do I need to install a separate font?

Thanks for your time!

iSilo
02-13-2006, 08:01 AM
Most likely, if it is indeed a CE Star issue, you will not be able to do anything to fix it aside from removing CE Star. In iSilo, while viewing a document, a couple of things you might look into include the font settings and the encoding settings. For the font settings in Tools/Options/Font, try setting all of Default, Series, and Sans Serif families to use the Tahoma font. For the encoding setting in Tools/Options/Content, if it does not say "Specified by document", try setting it to Windows-1252.

eschelar
03-06-2006, 07:27 AM
FANTASTIC!

I set the font to Windows 1252 and it switched from Big5 to what I assume is a standard windows encoding system.

This fixed all the problems I had previously encountered (although I'm not interested in checking out that nasty little trouble that occured when I changed the font and it really rucked things up - it's all better now, don't fix what ain't broke right?).

My apostrophe's and quotation marks are back with no troubles and even my invisible links have appeared!!!

This is wonderful! Thanks so much. I guessed that it was an encoding issue, but I had no Idea which to choose. I thought I had tried UTF, but that didn't seem to do the trick.