# Problem reading Chinese on the new Kindle 3



## fm3321

Hi all, new to Kindle-world here.

Anyone else have a problem reading Chinese text on the new K3? I uploaded a few mobi files and txt files converted from Calibre and some of the characters would be replaced by squares [_]. I even tried creating my own txt file and inserting some Chinese text onto it and still have the same problem. 

Thanks for any suggestions you can provide.


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## NiLuJe

The fonts may be missing some unicode coverage needed for this particular language... But do try to make sure everything's properly using UTF-8 .

Can't really say until I've got my K3 (assuming the thing's docile enough to be jailbreaked) .


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## NogDog

Is the default K3 font set even supposed to support UTF-8? (Of course I think it _should_, but I hadn't heard anything one way or the other that such support was being added to the K3.)


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## NiLuJe

Greater unicode coverage was supposed to be one of the new features, but it seems to be somewhat incomplete/using crappy looking symbols from the few feedback I've read so far .


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## ppw

I tried chinese Mobi too. It is full of "squares". Then I tried convert some chinese ePub to Mobi, PRC, PDF, TXT. All are unreadable.


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## lsg168

I emailed myself a txt format file to the free.kindle.com address and Kindle 3 displays with no problem. This is out-of-box configuration.









I downloaded Calibre and used its conversion and it is giving me a lot of unreadable squares too. I also tried USB loading of Chinese .txt file to K3, but it is giving me scrambled Chinese text. Same .txt file in English copied via USB has no problem.

For now emailing myself via [email protected] seem to be a workable solution to me and since the file will show up on K3 when connected to Wifi, it is actually convenient. The only problem is that the file name is not recognizable under Kindle's document folder.


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## energy

I found this on Amazon:

Support for Non-Latin Characters
Kindle can now display Cyrillic (such as Russian), Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), and Korean characters in addition to Latin and Greek scripts for certain file types. To view your personal documents with non-Latin characters on your Kindle, send your 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 and sent to your Kindle via the Wi-Fi connection and also to the e-mail address associated with your Amazon.com account at no charge. See more details about Kindle’s Personal Document Service via Whispernet here. Loading TXT files containing non-Latin characters over USB is currently not supported as some characters may not display properly. 

I am considering buying a K3 but it seems like it has problem displaying Chinese. Can anyone tried the above method to see if it works? Thanks a lot!


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## SusanCassidy

I suspect it is some kind of encoding issue.  The source file's encoding must be properly specified for the application (Calibre, etc.) to be able to properly convert it.  Per the Calibre documentation:
"# Knowing the encoding of the source file: calibre tries to guess what character encoding your source files use, but often, this is impossible, so you need to tell it what encoding to use. This can be done in the GUI via the Input character encoding  field in the Look & Feel section. The command-line tools all have an --input-encoding  option.
# When adding HTML files to calibre, you may need to tell calibre what encoding the files are in. To do this go to Preferences->Plugins->File Type plugins and customize the HTML2Zip plugin, telling it what encoding your HTML files are in. Now when you add HTML files to calibre they will be correctly processed. HTML files from different sources often have different encodings, so you may have to change this setting repeatedly. A common encoding for many files from the web is cp1252 and I would suggest you try that first. Note that when converting HTML files, leave the input encoding setting mentioned above blank. This is because the HTML2ZIP plugin automatically converts the HTML files to a standard encoding (utf-."


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## lsg168

energy said:


> I found this on Amazon:
> 
> Support for Non-Latin Characters
> Kindle can now display Cyrillic (such as Russian), Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), and Korean characters in addition to Latin and Greek scripts for certain file types. To view your personal documents with non-Latin characters on your Kindle, send your 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 and sent to your Kindle via the Wi-Fi connection and also to the e-mail address associated with your Amazon.com account at no charge. See more details about Kindle's Personal Document Service via Whispernet here. Loading TXT files containing non-Latin characters over USB is currently not supported as some characters may not display properly.
> 
> I am considering buying a K3 but it seems like it has problem displaying Chinese. Can anyone tried the above method to see if it works? Thanks a lot!


The answer is yes and no. I have also reported this problem to the CS and they have asked me to send them some samples for them to look into.

I would say the success rate is over 60%. The majority of files I convert are .txt/.doc format, although I have tried pdf as well. One thing I know DOES NOT work is copying the .txt file directly using USB method (I have no idea how to verify if encoding is UTF-.

The file I downloaded from gutenberg (epub/mobi) format converted quite well except the title is totally scrambled. Most of the title displayed under home screen will have one or more scrambled text, and since the author will always be your email address, this could be a problem if you load a few books

When the conversion works, K3 displays quite nicely and fonts can be enlarged/reduced.

I bought K3 because it can display Chinese font natively and its low price. I recommend you getting one, it is worth it. All these problems can be ironed out via a software update later.


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## richardb

Here are my steps for converting chinese texts to the Kindle 3:

1. http://www.mandarintools.com/ 
-> Tools for Using Chinese -> Chinese Encoding Converter
Convert to Unicode

2. http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsCreator.asp
MobiPocket Creator 4.2
Import (txt) Document
Language : Chinese (PRC)
Encoding: UTF-8

-> HTML -> Build 
Rename the filename with chinese characters.

3. Copy the build prc to your Kindle 3 and enjoy the book in Chinese.

Unfortunately the file names are sometimes with squares.

I hope a firmware update will fix this soon.


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## energy

Thank you so much for the information! It helps a lot. I was debating whether I should purchase Kindle 3 or Hanvon (which is pricey compared to Kindle). I think I lean toward Kindle 3 and hopefully they can solve the problem soon.


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## SusanCassidy

When you convert from one character set to another, you have to make certain that you have the correct original encoding.  If you don't know for sure, at least some characters are going to be misinterpreted.

Unfortunately, Chinese is one of the languages which has been encoded many different ways, and no two are exactly alike.  Some character encodings are very close to each other, but not identical.


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## richardb

Chinese Epubs converted to mobi with i.e. Calibre are displayed correctly with a Kindle DX Graphite with Unicode Font Hack, but not with a Kindle 3  

At the moment there seems to be -like I mentioned above- only one way: converting a txt-file to Unicode and then to Mobi with Mobipocket Creator.


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## Suozhuzi

The Kindle must still be using file-specific encoding systems rather than just dumping everything into utf-8, which is a real shame. I came here from the Calibre site, where the developer is pinning the blame on the Kindle:

http://bugs.calibre-ebook.com/ticket/6821

All files I've emailed to myself have come out with the title incorrectly encoded and the body correctly encoded (same as other posters here), which makes me think that part of the conversion process is somehow detecting the language of the file itself (ignoring the filename) and then putting it into a specific encoding. All files transferred directly to the kindle, whether using the filesystem or something like calibre, go in their original encoding (in my case utf-, which is not read correctly by the Kindle.

It would be great to have proper Unicode support!


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## SusanCassidy

Many types of files have a way to specify the original encoding, but not all, and not all file creators specify the encoding. If the encoding is unknown, and the software has to assume what encoding it is in, it could be a wrong guess. Therefore, the conversion from one encoding to another might not be correct.

There are a bunch of issues with Unicode and Chinese. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode.


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## richardb

Grandmaster NiLuJe solved this problem with his font hack, now available also for the Kindle 3!

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88004

Now converted epubs, the book titles and even the speech marks " are shown correctly.

Kindle 3 is now for me the perfect Ebook reader!


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## NiLuJe

And I'm actually not even sure how the book titles got fixed... .


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## dudelazy

I too have the problem with Chinese characters in book list display. Then it stroke me that it might be the simplified/traditional thing. So I converted all my filenames to traditional Chinese and now they are displayed nicely.

On the other hand, I also have loaded a simplified Chinese PDF created with OpenOffice. It's displayed correctly out-of-the-box. I have not tried .azw and .txt though.


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## hyraxer

if the chinese characters replaced by squares [_]
you can trying the following steps:

click the home button
click the enter button
just input 
;debugOn (click enter button)
~changeLocale zh-CN (click enter button)
;debugOff (click enter button)

and then restart your kindle, everthing will be OK.
I have slove the problem on my kindle3,
just try it!


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## tjulisen

richardb said:


> Grandmaster NiLuJe solved this problem with his font hack, now available also for the Kindle 3!
> 
> http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88004
> 
> Now converted epubs, the book titles and even the speech marks " are shown correctly.
> 
> Kindle 3 is now for me the perfect Ebook reader!


The hacks work perfect. But do you have problems with opening Chinese txt files? Many many files cannot be opened on my kindle 3. It bothered me a lot.


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## hyraxer

tjulisen said:


> The hacks work perfect. But do you have problems with opening Chinese txt files? Many many files cannot be opened on my kindle 3. It bothered me a lot.


can you send some sample txt file that cannot open properly,
to my mail box,[email protected]
I will test it on my k3,


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## lsg168

I downloaded the latest (Nov.20 version) of Chinese Dunkan (多看) and installed on my K3 (wifi only) and now I have a duo-boot system. Since it is layer on top of K3 system, I can choose to boot to original K3 system anytime. Although it is beta version, I have not had any problems yet.

English discussion here.
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=105316
If you can read Chinese, visit here.
http://www.duokan.com/forum/viewthread.php?tid=2208&extra=page%3D1

Although it is quite easy to install this version - it only involves copying three folders and three files to the K3 root folder, reboot twice - I think the benefit for English readers may not warrant this trouble.

However, one of the neat feature they provide is to read PDF files. For scanned version, this Duokan system allows you to zoom to an user-defined %, cut-off white space(margin), and allow user to darken the display. I wish Amazon will include the zoom % to a user setting in their next software upgrade, that way when combined with viewing in landscape mode, we can use the pageup/pagedown button to scroll half of the page.

Of course the Duokan system produces reflowed PDF if it is a PDF output file, but for me the above zoom to fit line width, and use pageup/pagedown to scroll works quite well on most letter/A4 sized PDF files. Since I only paid less than half of the DX price for my Kindle3, I can live with viewing my PDF sideway half page at a time.

Also on Chinese text/books, it does Chinese TTS(Madarin/Cantonese) and the speech sounds a lot more natural than what's on K3 system.


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## ricky1194

Bump...

I have some PDFs that I changed to MOBI and now they won't read on the Kindle 3 WI-FI.  I tried Jailbreaking and font adds (as was mentioned) and it still doesn't work.  All I get is random letters and symbols.  Any ideas?


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