Chinese Fonts on Rockbox revisited

[thenrik]

I searched the forums and there has been some discussion about making Chinese fonts work on Rockbox off and on for the last couple of years.

I used the Rockbox Font Converter to convert simsun.ttf, mingliu.ttf and msmincho.ttf but my Chinese songs titles still just display filled in boxes for song titles.

Is it possible or will it never work. I have a Gigabeat F40 if that makes any difference.

Thanks,

Tom

[Mad Cow]

You have to enable unicode. It's in General Settings-->Display-->Default Codepage. If that still doesn't work then you have to tags your file with unicode.

EDIT: You could also try Simp.Chinese or Trad.Chinese from the same menu.

[thenrik]

Well, I tried switching the code page to Unicode, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese without any luck.

I also tried getting and converting some additional unicode Chinese fonts with the Rockbox font converter but also had no luck.

Has anyone been able to successfully display Chinese on Rockbox?

Thanks,

Tom

[Mad Cow]

Are your files tagged in unicode?

[markun]

Has anyone been able to successfully display Chinese on Rockbox?

yes: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=9651.0

[Twilight in Zero]

Japanese, which isn't too far off from Chinese (Heck, the language uses Chinese characters anyway) works just fine on my 5G iPod, if it's any help.

It sounds to me like your files' tags are broken. I have a case of that with one of my songs. I have a copy of Chiraha Minori's Makenai (The ending song for the Tenjou Tenge OVA, if it matters), that just shows up as a bunch of strange characters. I haven't bothered to fix it yet.

You might just need to retag your files yourself.

[thenrik]

Problem solved. Thanks to all who helped.

Markun's  post had the solution: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=9651.0

It only works by enabling Unifont as your default system font, General Settings-->Display-->Fonts.

Then as Mad Cow pointed out selecting Unicode as the default codepage worked with Japanese, at least Hirigana. "It's in General Settings-->Display-->Default Codepage"

I downloaded mp3tag 2.37 via Markun's link, see above. You have to go to options and enable unicode as the default: Go to Options, tags, Mpeg and then select the button: ID3v2.3 ISO-8859-1 and resave your Chinese/Japanese tags.

I found I had to enable Simplified Chinese as the code page to successfully display Chinese characters. It also worked with Hirigana Japanese songs. I only have a few Japanese song but will test for Kanji later.

I'm using the Ajax theme on my Gigabeat F40. Enabling Unifont as the default font gives the theme a plain text flavor, not unlike Courier in Windows. It's not pretty but it works. I'll have to look at the theme to figure out its default font and switch back and forth.

It doesn't work with all of my songs, probably only unicode compliant tags but works with most.

Again thanks to all!

Tom

[thenrik]

Hi:

  Woops. I put the wrong url for the unicode guide. It should be:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/UnicodeGuide

Tom

[Twilight in Zero]

Unifont is less than pretty, and only comes in one size. I'd recommend the Espy+asian12 in my WPS, but it's smaller than Unifont and would probably mess up the WPS.

When I get to a computer with a competent internet collection (I'm sitting in front of dial-up, and it HURTS), I'll go looking for a pleasant-looking freeware font, and find a way to combine Sazanami Gothic's asian characters with it. Then I'll see if I can't convert it to a bunch of sizes to use as drop-in replacements.

[thenrik]

I'll certainly be looking forward to Twilight in Zero's fonts whenever he gets around to it. Please post to the forum to let us know

Thanks,

Tom

[oil_water]

试试发中文可以不可以``嘿嘿````

[AlexP]

试试发中文可以不可以``嘿嘿````

These are English forums please.