Unable to read Chinese in iSilo PocketPC

[daveshih]

Hi, everybody,

Perhaps I'm not doing something correctly... please advise.

I'm using my trusty HP Jornada 567 PocketPC (PPC2002), English version with Monster Chinese v3.2 installed (http://www.mactiontech.com). I've been using it for years reading Chinese (in Big5 and GB encoding). Both the GismoSoft EasyReader (http://buy.gismosoft.com/product/detail.asp?pw_id=15) and MactionTech FlyBook read and display my small collection of .prc and .txt Chinese (again, encoded in Big5 and GB) documents fine.

Enters iSilo. I'm trying out the iSilo PPC 4.15 and so far it cannot display Chinese from any of my .prc and .txt files. I tried changing the encoding and font selections without any success. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for you time,

David

[iSilo]

This has been investigated before using Monster Chinese and the issue seems to be that Monster Chinese does not add support for converting from Big5 to Unicode. So what you will need to do in iSiloX for converting documents is to set the output encoding to Unicode (UTF-8). To do this for an entry in iSiloX, go to its Properties, click the Document tab, click Text Encoding Options, and set the Output document text encoding to Unicode (UTF-8). Then reconvert.

Nothing can be done for a converted document that is not in UTF-8, so if you can not reconvert the document from its source, you won't be able to read it for this case.

[daveshih]

Thanks for the quick reply.

This has been investigated before using Monster Chinese and the issue seems to be that Monster Chinese does not add support for converting from Big5 to Unicode.

I had read it somewhere in this forum that iSilo has changed its way of processing various encodings since v4 to be unicode, and I'm assuming that this is what this issue is about:
iSilo opens a Big5 .txt file, interprets it and presents/displays it using unicode, but since Monter Chinese doesn't do Unicode, so no Chinese shows up in iSilo.

Does that sound right?

On second thought, what if I install on my PPC a real unicode font? Hmm...probably not going to help, either, huh?

David

[iSilo]

iSilo for Pocket PC did not support display of Chinese text before version 4.0. So in version 3.x of iSilo for Pocket PC, it was impossible to view Chinese text regardless of the encoding.

The change that you refer to is in "iSilo for Windows", not "iSilo for Pocket PC".

Again, what you need to do is ensure that the iSilo documents that you read are encoded in UTF-8. If it is encoded with Big-5 and there is no conversion support in the OS to convert from Big-5 to Unicode, then the Chinese will not display.

However, if you had a Chinese version of the Pocket PC OS on your device, then Big-5 to Unicode support would already be built-in and in that case, you would be able to read both Big-5 and Unicode encoded documents with iSilo. But you are using Monster Chinese, so as mentioned before, Monster Chinese does not have conversion support for Big-5 to Unicode, so you need to make sure that your iSilo documents with Chinese content are encoded in UTF-8.

Regarding the fact that the other two readers you mentioned are able to display Big-5 content is probably the case that they have built-in Big-5 to Unicode conversion. After all, both those readers appear to be native Chinese readers. iSilo does not have that conversion built-in, but relies on the operating system for such support.

[daveshih]

Ok, thanks for clearing it up!

Handling various languages has always been difficult no matter what platform it may be. Windows didn't get to be multi language friendly until Windows XP, and it still has room for improvement. Keep up the good work! Perhaps one day (well, certainly not on my Jornada) we can really enjoy multi-lingual freedom.

Again, thanks for your prompt reply,

David

[scyang]

I followed the steps and changed the encoding as instructed, and re-converted again. But what came out what 2 square boxes. What could be wrong? Thanks.