Using foreign languages with Windows Mobile 5?

[stefand]

I am new to PocketPC's and have this question.

Is is possible to read complex scripts such as Arabic and Devanagari (Hindi) on a PocketPC running Windows Mobile 5? Can I just install fonts from my PC onto the PocketPC or do they have a special format? Also, is it possible to read Japanese and Chinese characters on a PocketPC. I'm not concerned about inputting these languages, just reading them. Thanks.

[GSmith]

In case no one else answers, I have a little experience with character encodings (but not fonts, really)

I know that an unmodified PPC has the capability to display web pages of international character encodings. My application (an RSS blog and news reader) supports a lot of different encodings based on what is provided by the operating system in the form of "code pages".

On my English (UK) version of Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox 720 running Windows Mobile 2003SE, the following "code pages" are available:
windows-1252
IBM437
ibm737
ibm775
IBM850
IBM852
cp855
IBM857
cp866
utf-16
unicodeFFFE
windows-1250
windows-1251
windows-1252
windows-1253
windows-1254
windows-1257
us-ascii
csKOI8R
koi8-u
iso-8859-2
iso-8859-3
iso-8859-4
iso-8859-5
iso-8859-7
utf-7
utf-8

I have been able to display blogs and news items in danish, french, spanish, and greek (which involves windows-1252 and iso-8859-7 encodings) which indicates that the Pocket PC supports both the encodings and the fonts for both of these 8-bit encodings. As far as full font support for the various utf encodings, I'd doubt it. But how far the support goes, I'm not sure.

A quick google search revealed:
http://www.freewareppc.com/docs/textviewer.shtml which claims:


Normally if you use English version PocketPC, you cannot read Japanese, Chinese nor Korean Language on you PDA.
This TextViewer, however, allows you to read many language text file with PDA.

Version 3.0 starts to support Palm Doc format (Western and Japanese).

You can choose as following character codings.
- Japanese Shift JIS
- Japanese ISO-2022-JP (JIS)
- Japanese EUC

Unicode (Chinese, Korea etc..)
- Unicode (UTF-8)
- Unicode (UTF-16) (BOM support)

European Language (Additional support)
- ISO-8859-1 Western
- ISO-8859-2 Central Europe
- ISO-8859-3 South Europe
- ISO-8859-4 Baltic
- ISO-8859-5 Cyrillic
- ISO-8859-7 Greek


I hope this helps!

Greg Smith
Author, FeederReader - Pocket PC *direct* RSS text, audio, video, podcasts
www.FeederReader.com - Download on the Road

[stefand]

Thanks for your reply GSmith. I know that Windows Mobile 5 supports Unicode encoding, and really thats only what people use these days.

It's not a question of supporting the encoding, but supporting the rendering of the particular scripts. Complex scripts (Arabic, Hindi, Thai etc.) are quite hard to render because of glyph reordering, substitution, and usually an extensive set of ligatures. The operating system would need to be specially written to handle these scripts, and this is my question.

If noone knows whether this is possible, would someone with a Unicode font installed be able to go to "http://www.devanaagarii.net/ks/" on their PocketPC and determine whether the complex script on that page is rendered correctly? Thanks.

[Nurhisham Hussein]

stefand, it is possible to see complex languages like you mention without a specific language OS (though you will need specific font support). You can see for example:

http://www.pocketislam.com/

I've used their products before, and all it does to display Arabic fonts is to use a modified version of the Arial ttf file. There are also Japanese and Chinese IMEs available designed for installation over an English OS:

http://www.mobem.com/products/CE-Star.php

http://www.firstloox.org/forums/showthread.php?t=4510&highlight=ime

[Nurhisham Hussein]

Ok I actually tested this out. I installed some of the fonts from the link you provided (specifically Sanskrit 2003, Shree, and Yogesh), soft reset and tried to open the link - no go I'm afraid. None of the fonts worked for showing the script, either on the website, or even in any of the text editors I have.

I also took the rather drastic step of hacking the registry and directly changing the system font with Sanskrit and Yogesh (I didn't dare with the Shree as it doesn't appear to have any roman characters at all) - again all I got on the website was square characters (i.e. the PPC couldn't map the font).

I still don't believe it's a rendering issue - I've managed at least one cyrillic font without any problems, and of course the software and IMEs I mentioned do work as well.

[stefand]

Thats a really disapointment... I thought a PocketPC would make a great foreign language dictionary or vocabulary tester. Anyway, thanks for your help Hishamh.

[Nurhisham Hussein]

No problem - FWIW, I think you'll need to develop a specific program or applet to get what you want. On the other hand, if you search hard enough, somebody is bound to come up with something that will do it for you:

http://lingvosoft.globaltranslator.biz/index.html

[gwinter]

The operating system would need to be specially written to handle these scripts, and this is my question.

That would be the Uniscribe engine. While it is available for Windows CE, none of the currently shipping PPC SKU included it. Until there is an Arabic/Hebrew/etc SKU, I'm afraid it just won't be available.

Also, is it possible to read Japanese and Chinese characters on a PocketPC.

Displaying CJK scripts, on the other hand, is relatively easy. You just need to link the appropriate fonts into the system. Note that CJK scripts are not complex scripts, because they do not need character shaping and other processes that you've described. Which is why there is no problem in displaying these script in the first place.