Problem with Italics in Skyscape reader caused by iSilo?

[babelfish]

Please help!

I know it's a long shot but could all my Skyscape Italics problems (see pic!)have been caused by isilo reader interference?

I am currntly using ClieTJ35 and none of the Italics letters in any of the Skyscape medical textbooks are being displayed properly.

I tried contacting Skyscape but they don't know what's wrong with it!

Am I the only one with this problem?

There must be other people out there using skyscape textbooks on their Clie!
If any of you can think of a solution, please reply.

Thank you,

Daniel

[iSilo]

I'm not exactly sure about the reason why you would suspect a relationship between Skyscape and iSilo, but the answer is that iSilo would not be the cause of such a problem. Palm OS does not have any support for italics, so each application has to do its own implementation.

Are you saying that italics in Skyscape were working on your TJ35 before? Or did you just get your TJ35 and/or Skyscape, in which case this is the first time you've seen Skyscape with italics on your TJ35, and assuming so, then I very much suspect the problem must be with Skyscape's implementation of italics on Palm OS 5 Sony Clie device. It can get a little confusing for the developer with regard to mitigating the differences between Palm OS 5's high-density API and Sony's own hi-res API. I think you should point out specifically to them that the upper half of their italicized text appears to be offset by one too many pixels and mention to them about mitigating the differences between Palm OS 5's high-density API and Sony's own hi-res API.

Alternatively, maybe that's the way Skyscape intends italics to look.

[Voltage Spike]

One too many pixels? To me, the Skyscrape italics look identical to those of iSilo on my high-resolution screen (i.e., normal font with the upper half shifted right by one pixel). I agree that this is exactly how Skyscrape italics are supposed to look.

Maybe he is upset that the italics don't look as nice as iSilo using fully-converted[1] FontSilo fonts. ;)

[1] By "fully-converted", I mean fonts that include the pre-rendered italics representation as part of the font.

[babelfish]

Ok folks, many thanks for your replies.

The reason I thought iSilo might have something to do with it is that all the skyscape documents also appear as isilo documents, though when you try to open them they are encrypted and appear garbled. So I thought if I can open them with isilo, maybe the two document readers share some font preferences or so.

Though I feel somewhat relieved to be told that this is how italics are supposed to look, I still find it hard to accept. In infectious diseases, all the microorganism's names are always italizised - that's normal. As nearly every second word is a bug it makes it exceedingly hard to read. So why would the producers of these e-textbooks use italics at all?

Please tell me that it looks better on a Palm (or a Clie with lower resolution) - that would at least give my mind some rest.

Again, thank you for your input.

[iSilo]

One too many pixels? To me, the Skyscrape italics look identical to those of iSilo on my high-resolution screen (i.e., normal font with the upper half shifted right by one pixel). I agree that this is exactly how Skyscrape italics are supposed to look.
The italicized letters in the Skyscape screenshot have the upper half shifted by two pixels, not one. So I don't know whether that is intentional or whether they really want the upper half shifted only by one pixel instead of two.

[Voltage Spike]

The italicized letters in the Skyscape screenshot have the upper half shifted by two pixels, not one. So I don't know whether that is intentional or whether they really want the upper half shifted only by one pixel instead of two.

I apologize. My resolution is too high for the size of the monitor. :p

iSilo (the person) is correct. Contact Skyscape and request that they change their italics rendering. That's just awful...

As for low-resolution devices, I imagine it would look worse. The 160x160 screens have half as many pixels (horizontally) to play around with but are the same size; two pixels is a relatively huge gap to seperate the letters.

[iSilo]

As for low-resolution devices, I imagine it would look worse. The 160x160 screens have half as many pixels (horizontally) to play around with but are the same size; two pixels is a relatively huge gap to seperate the letters.My guess would be that it is working correctly on 160x160 screens in that on such devices, the shift is probably correctly only one pixel. There are a lot of subtleties in all the different Palm OS devices out there with regard to the programming APIs that unless you are a developer, you don't realize. I would venture to guess that this particular issue is due to those subtleties.

[babelfish]

Oh well, at least you agree with me in that it looks awful. That makes me feel a little better. I am also relieved to know that there's nothing OBVIOUS that I should do such as perhaps installing a different system font or so.

Guess I'll have to be more persistent with skyscape - I'm still amazed people buy this stuff! Oh yeah, right, people like me :o

Anyway, thx for all your input!