Document reader punctuation mark problem

[netonik]

Hey guys,
Just bought the document reader and am trying to use it to read the texts available here: http://faculty.virginia.edu/cll/chinese ... diate.html. It works well for a couple, but for most every time it hits a punctuation mark it shows a square instead of a "," or ":" or what have you. This text is a good example of the problem: http://faculty.virginia.edu/cll/chinese ... inese.html. I've tried it a few ways, including saving it using the web reader, copying and pasting it to a text file on my comp, saving as UTF-8 and and then using the file-upload functionality etc. In every case the result is the same, the Chinese characters work fine, but every punctuation mark is a square which makes the documents quite difficult to read.

The only solution I've found is after the doc is open in the Pleco doc reader if I switch to edit mode and go through and type in the punctuation marks using the iPhone keypad next time I re-open they're correct. Any suggestions or workarounds? Manually editing each file on the iPhone doesn't really work. It does work fine if I use live mode and read the HTML version, but then I can't read in places when I don't have internet access...

 

[mikelove]

Just bought the document reader and am trying to use it to read the texts available here: http://faculty.virginia.edu/cll/chinese ... diate.html. It works well for a couple, but for most every time it hits a punctuation mark it shows a square instead of a "," or ":" or what have you. This text is a good example of the problem: http://faculty.virginia.edu/cll/chinese ... inese.html. I've tried it a few ways, including saving it using the web reader, copying and pasting it to a text file on my comp, saving as UTF-8 and and then using the file-upload functionality etc. In every case the result is the same, the Chinese characters work fine, but every punctuation mark is a square which makes the documents quite difficult to read.

The only solution I've found is after the doc is open in the Pleco doc reader if I switch to edit mode and go through and type in the punctuation marks using the iPhone keypad next time I re-open they're correct. Any suggestions or workarounds? Manually editing each file on the iPhone doesn't really work. It does work fine if I use live mode and read the HTML version, but then I can't read in places when I don't have internet access...

You can actually save the HTML versions for offline reading; tap on the + button at the bottom of the screen and you'll see "Save this page" listed as one of the options.

As far as why the punctuation isn't showing up correctly, though, it looks like the problem there is that these pages are using a set of special punctuation characters that the iPhone's built-in fonts don't know how to render; should be possible for us to add code to automatically remap them to iPhone-friendly punctuation marks in a future update, but there's not much we can do about them without updating our app.

 

[netonik]

Figured it was something along those lines. I ended up making a quick bookmarklet that replaces the punctuation marks with the standard punctuation marks, so I've put the bookmarklet on my iphone and have been using that before saving the file into Pleco. A bit cumbersome but works well enough for now. Thanks for the quick reply, and for a great piece of software.