I still like my Kindle Touch but I got a surprise when I tried downloading some Chinese and Hebrew E-books from the internet archive into my Kindle. It did not work. I tried the mobi and pdf format. The English text made it fine. The non-latin text got garbled.
Here is what they say…
The Kindle Keyboard can display Latin and Greek scripts, as well as content in Russian, Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), and Korean for certain file types.
[i]To view a personal document with non-Latin characters on your Kindle, send the file as a Microsoft Word document (.DOC) attachment to your Kindle’s e-mail address ("name"@free.kindle.com). The file will be converted to Kindle format for free and sent to both your Kindle (via the Wi-Fi connection) and also to the e-mail address associated with your Amazon.com account. See more details about Kindle’s Personal Document Service here:
Loading TXT files containing non-Latin characters over USB is currently not supported as some characters may not display properly.
Your Kindle recognizes the following file types:
— Audible.com (.AA)
— Kindle (.AZW or .TPZ)
— Mobi (.MOBI, .PRC)
— MP3 music format (.MP3)
— Text (.TXT)
[/i]
And this… Documents must be 50MB or smaller. No more than 25 attachments can be sent in one e-mail. If you’re sending multiple files, you can compress them into a single zip file. If you choose to not archive your documents and your Kindle is not connected wirelessly, we store your document for 60 days and attempt to deliver to your Kindle once it restores wireless connectivity. Personal documents not delivered within this time period will be deleted.
50 MB, what E-book is smaller than 50 MB. if they can convert it, there must be some workaround that we could do. Until then… there goes my using the Kindle to study with. Any thoughts here…
I’ve never used it for converting anything other than English but it does a good job.[/quote]
Yeah, sorry… my bad… I’m still getting used to Megabytes when we are now in the world of Tetrabytes…
Yes, I did use that suggested software. No DICE with any Non English PDFs or Mobi Books.
Anyone test out non English conversions of books, please let me know. Specifically, Chinese and its Ba Pa Ma subscript. I use that often in PDF’s. And Hebrew with the vowels too.
And I’m curious. How come they (Amazn) are able to convert “non latin” documents via the mail service yet, we can’t import the documents directly. Is someone holding something back? Seems strange. Are they reading our documents?
And Chinese characters show up fine on it too, other than in the index on the home pages. For example, the Kindle file of Hónglóu Mèng works without a hitch on my Kindle.
It seems unlikely that a newer version of Kindle would have less support for Hanzi and diacritics.
Okay, I just ran a test with a few paragraphs copy and pasted from the internet onto a Word page. I converted the page to a pdf using PrimoPDF and the used Calibre to covert it into a moby file. The characters appear fine but, the seem to be repeated. In other words, you get a string of the same characters in a row which is not how the original looks.
I imagine it’ll just take some fiddling to get this right. (In the past, btw, I have only had a few Chinese characters in an otherwise English text which is why they read properly I guess).
I’m certainly gonna find out… I guess it would be all latin ascii should be fine. Before unicode, it was a mess doing non-latin characters. But anyway… I’m shocked at this discovery. The Kindle web browser does Chinese fine, even if it is too small to see.
Someone with time… please put the kindle through its paces. i really don’t have that much time to play…
(I’m writing this in between trying discipline my children, prepare dinner and getting ready for my evening students… I used to enjoy playing with computers now I just want to use them and really peeved at this discovery…
We are in Taiwan, most of us that is, we should be able to know if we can enjoy Chinese personal documents and E-book.s I specifially got the kindle for it’s E-ink screen. I had my fill of trying to see my documents on PDA LCD screens, LapTops and phones in the Bright sunlight of Taiwan. This E-ink screen is heaven. Does the Nook have an E-ink screen? I’m already invested in Amazon though… Really, I don’t think allowing unicode and landscape mode in the Kindle would take a genius programmer. But I am not one… so I don’t know…
This is annoying. I sent a Chinese E-book through the conversion process. It did not work! This was a Children’s Chinese language learning book from the Ministry of Education.
The book has three flavors of text and an image: Chinese Traditional/ Pinyin and English. Chinese was missing/ Pinyin seemed mostly OK and English worked.
If anyone has mastered getting Chinese/Hebrew or other text into his or her Kindle, please PM me. I really need this ability. Thanks.
Have you tried simply dragging the files from your computer onto your Kindle? Skip sending things to Amazon for conversion costs money, doesn’t it?
Try this.
[ul][li]Save your source file as RTF (unless it’s originally a TXT file, in which case you’re probably fine already and you could probably just drag the file directly into your Kindle’s DOC folder and skip the other steps). [/li]
[li]Get Calibre. [/li]
[li]Have Calibre convert your RTF file into MOBI.[/li]
[li]Connect your Kindle to your computer.[/li]
[li]Use Calibre to send your new MOBI file to your computer.[/li][/ul]
[quote=“cranky laowai”]Have you tried simply dragging the files from your computer onto your Kindle? Yes.Skip sending things to Amazon for conversion costs money, doesn’t it? Not in WIFI mode, they even said dragging personal documents via usb with not work, first post in this thread was a paste from Amazon’s letter.
Try this.
[ul][li]Save your source file as RTF (unless it’s originally a TXT file, in which case you’re probably fine already and you could probably just drag the file directly into your Kindle’s DOC folder and skip the other steps). I’ll try it but I do want to keep the E-book format[/li]
[li]Get Calibre. [/li]
[li]Have Calibre convert your RTF file into MOBI.I’ve tried that too, no Chinese text. It just went missing[/li]
[li]Connect your Kindle to your computer.[/li]
[li]Use Calibre to send your new MOBI file to your computer.[/li][/ul][/quote]
Here are some files to play with: A book about Chinese grammar from the internet archive. Has some Chinese text. There are some Chinese characters in tables. This book offers many formats including “Kindle” but it is really a “Mobi” There are also PDF versions.
Or any of the PDF of Chinese children’s books available at this site… edu.ocac.gov.tw/interact/ebook/d … asp?Lang=C
And to round things off, I’d like a hebrew prayer book available at archive.org/details/authoriseddailyp00sing
So there you go…
I’m loving the Kindle Screen. I can actually see the screen outside! I finally found a “page turner” library book that I can’t put down. I really want to ditch my laptop and have one device for my reading needs. Hope you guys can help me to get my PDF files to work. I
[quote=“cranky laowai”]Have you tried simply dragging the files from your computer onto your Kindle? Yes.Skip sending things to Amazon for conversion costs money, doesn’t it? Not in WIFI mode, they even said dragging personal documents via usb with not work, first post in this thread was a paste from Amazon’s letter.
Try this.
[ul][li]Save your source file as RTF (unless it’s originally a TXT file, in which case you’re probably fine already and you could probably just drag the file directly into your Kindle’s DOC folder and skip the other steps). I’ll try it but I do want to keep the E-book format[/li]
[li]Get Calibre. [/li]
[li]Have Calibre convert your RTF file into MOBI.I’ve tried that too, no Chinese text. It just went missing[/li]
[li]Connect your Kindle to your computer.[/li]
[li]Use Calibre to send your new MOBI file to your computer.[/li][/ul][/quote]
Here are some files to play with: A book about Chinese grammar from the internet archive. Has some Chinese text. There are some Chinese characters in tables. This book offers many formats including “Kindle” but it is really a “Mobi” There are also PDF versions.
Or any of the PDF of Chinese children’s books available at this site… edu.ocac.gov.tw/interact/ebook/d … asp?Lang=C
And to round things off, I’d like a hebrew prayer book available at archive.org/details/authoriseddailyp00sing
So there you go…
I’m loving the Kindle Screen. I can actually see the screen outside! I finally found a “page turner” library book that I can’t put down. I really want to ditch my laptop and have one device for my reading needs. Hope you guys can help me to get my PDF files to work. I
I would love to get Chinese dictionary lookup on my 3rd Gen. Kindle. Although it recognizes Chinese characters fine, there is no way to look them up in the dictionary. Anyone managed to do this?
[quote=“Taiwan_Student”]Here are some files to play with: A book about Chinese grammar from the internet archive. Has some Chinese text. There are some Chinese characters in tables. This book offers many formats including “Kindle” but it is really a “Mobi” There are also PDF versions.
Or any of the PDF of Chinese children’s books available at this site… edu.ocac.gov.tw/interact/ebook/d … asp?Lang=C
And to round things off, I’d like a hebrew prayer book available at archive.org/details/authoriseddailyp00sing[/quote]
The problem with those documents is not related to your Kindle.
In the case of the PDF from the OCAC, the document is locked, so the content cannot be copied or converted. And if it were unlocked, it probably still wouldn’t work because it’s using specialized fonts incompatible with Unicode and which the Kindle almost certainly would not support.
For the Hebrew document, the e-file does not have real Hebrew text. Those are images that do not appear to have been OCR’d as Hebrew. Thus, a shin, for example, will probably come out as a latin “w” rather than the Hebrew “ש”. In other words, there’s no Hebrew text for Amazon to convert for your Kindle, so it’s no wonder you’re getting garbage.
In the case of the PDF from the OCAC, the document is locked, so the content cannot be copied or converted. And if it were unlocked, it probably still wouldn’t work because it’s using specialized fonts incompatible with Unicode and which the Kindle almost certainly would not support. [/quote]
Then how come it displays OK on other devices… This I really don’t understand. The font itself is not Unicode? How come it appears on my English/ Chinese computer. I work with Bo Po Mo Fonts a lot. To the best of my knowledge they are all Unicode. Granted, when the fonts are used in a PDF, the fonts are embedded and are supposed to be displayed on any machine that supports the PDF format.
I usually encode my Bo Po Fa documents in pdf so I can display them anywhere. But there are times I just e-mailed the word file to a different computer. The words still appeared normal, only minus the Bo PO MO.
Seriously, thought that the Kindle would support “native” PDF that would include text and graphics.
[quote=“cranky laowai”]
For the Hebrew document, the e-file does not have real Hebrew text. Those are images that do not appear to have been OCR’d as Hebrew. Thus, a shin, for example, will probably come out as a latin “w” rather than the Hebrew “ש”. In other words, there’s no Hebrew text for Amazon to convert for your Kindle, so it’s no wonder you’re getting garbage.[/quote]
So, what won’t the graphics appear on my Kindle? Maybe I’m picking the wrong files. The advertisment for the kindle says that it supports Chinese Traditional documents. The web browser certainly does. Could you point me to some documents that look decent Kindle?
I’d like to know for sure about Traditional and Simplified Chinese support, as well as Pinyin. I’m looking to release Chinese learning readers via Kindle, but I don’t want to invest a lot of time and raise my blood pressure (and possibly that of people who buy them) before I know it will work.
Because the pdfs are all graphics. Try to zoom in: those are never text files. Thats also why the file is so big.
And Bopomofo is a special case: There are Bopomofo codepoints (ㄓㄨˋ) for example, but there is no software/no font which can display this properly (not just linear in a line, but syllable wise). Therefore, all the Bopomofo fonts just have the ordinary characters which built in Bopomofo syallables. Thats why it doesn’t show on other computers - if the other computer does not have the font, it cannot be displayed.
Therefore you have to include the fonts in the pdf, then it works fine. But if you copy it, the reading will be lost again.
And the problem with Kindle is that you can zoom into the document, for readers who want to have the text size a little larger. This seriously destrorys any good typography, imho. Also, the Kindle does not support custom fonts, afaik.
Concering typography, current E-Readers are really horrible. I don’t know what the developers thought about it. Most of the books look like badly designed web pages, not like books. No justified texts, and even if there is, it has no syllable breaks, chapter titles start at the bottom of the page, a page sometimes only has one line, the font is the decided by the ebook, not by the publisher etc…
Horrible, I think.
Imho, they should make something like a “native layout”, which is nicely designed by a typograph (e.g. like the book). And then if someone still wants to have it larger or smaller, he can destroy the layout and it will be displayed as it currently is.
