Kindle issue with Chinese characters. Is it just this book?

[Sarpedon]

I recently bought a new Kindle Voyage.  A while ago I purchased this book: http://www.amazon.com/Monkeys-Paw-Mandarin-Companion-Simplified-ebook/dp/B00GMMU2S0/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1415159730&sr=8-2&keywords=monkey%27s+paw+mandarin

 

When I read it on my iPhone using the Kindle app, I have no issues with the characters displaying as I expect them too.

 

However, when I read on my Kindle Voyage, I have an issue with two characters: 冷 and 直

 

I posted a screenshot so you can see what I'm talking about:

 

http://i.imgur.com/c2YmXSFl.jpg

 

The left side is the display on my iPhone 5s using the Kindle App.  The right side is an image I took from my Kindle Voyage with a camera.

 

I'm not sure if the characters are ever written in the way they are displaying, and if I'm just being nitpicky, or if they are written completely wrong.  I'm also not sure if this is an issue only with this specific book, or if there are issues with other books in Chinese as well.  I don't have any others to test with.

 

My Kindle is a brand new Voyage purchased in America direct from Amazon.

 

Kindle support was useless of course, they don't understand what my issue is.

 

Any input from others?

[hedwards]

I think that's a font thing. I've seen the same thing popping up from time to time on Memrise with 直 which was causing me quite a few problems.

 

I'm not aware of any ebook reader that really handles Chinese very well. The e-ink ones seem to be the worst. If there's an alternate font for Chinese on your voyage, I'd try that.

[Sarpedon]

I've tried every font available, they all render the characters the same way.

[Angelina]

 

 

My Kindle is a brand new Voyage purchased in America

 

That's where the problem is. I don't think you can solve it. Try to talk to people who bought the Voyage in China. 

[Mr John]

Hey,

 

I have an older model of the kindle, no backlight etc, and it also has problems displaying the characters you mentioned. By the way, I'm reading a different story from the same series called 盲人国. Unfortuntely, I haven't found a solution either. There is also one page where two characters overlap. Could be worse.

[oceancalligraphy]

There's nothing wrong with the Kindle or the font. That's just the way printed Chinese looks.

 

The font on the iPhone is a font that mimics handwriting and is the type of font found in textbooks. The font on the Kindle is basically the same as fonts seen in books or newspapers.

 

Here's a picture from a book. It just happens to have 直 at the bottom of the first column, and 令 at the top of the last column.

 

[imron]

Any input from others?

What you are seeing is basically the difference between g and g.  It's purely a stylistic font issue.

[Hofmann]

Likely the font chosen adheres to some standard. Being familiar with them will help you determine which one. If you can't install your own fonts then you can't do anything about it.

[Demonic_Duck]

There's nothing wrong with the Kindle or the font. That's just the way printed Chinese looks.

 

The font on the iPhone is a font that mimics handwriting and is the type of font found in textbooks. The font on the Kindle is basically the same as fonts seen in books or newspapers.

 

This may be true in Taiwan, but on the mainland, it's not the case for these characters - most printed material uses the familiar form. But yeah, it's basically just 异体字 (variant characters), although they have the same codes in unicode, hence why they look different in different fonts.

[Sarpedon]

Thanks for all the information everyone, it was very helpful.  Are there other characters that also have this characteristic?

[hedwards]

@yst, that depends what you mean by a problem, that rendition of the character is not the same as the one the OP was expecting and I've seen that substitution cause problems in computing. It may be that it's the same character to a knowledgable reader, but that's not the same thing as not being a problem. I've personally had questions on Memrise be unanswerable because the question wanted the previous version of the character rather than the latter and wouldn't allow you to enter the latter without manually copying and pasting it.

[lechuan]

Check this out: http://www.unicode.org/Public/5.2.0/charts/CodeCharts-MulticolHan.pdf

[hedwards]

@lechuan, thanks for the info, I'll have to keep a copy of that.

 

Anyways, it seems to me that this is fundamentally broken behavior. It's all well and good for variants to exist at large, but a book aimed at beginners shouldn't be using random variants depending upon the particular device that's being used. As annoyed as I was by Barnes & Noble using pictures of characters rather than fonts, I do have to admit that it at least ensures that you'll see the intended character or know that it's not correct. Rather than in this case where you see one of the variants and aren't sure if it's going to match up with the other ones.

 

I guess there's some room for discussion over whom it is precisely that should be responsible for fixing the behavior, but it's a bad thing for a book aimed at beginners to not have consistency within the same store.

[lechuan]

@Sarpedon, what font are you currently using on your Kindle Voyage? Have you tried other Chinese fonts (if there are any)?

[Jose]

Your device is using a font which renders characters in the traditional old printed style rather than the simplified standard. This is quite common when you use a device bought outside China as it doesn't come with a Chinese operating system and the font being used is some generic East Asian font rather than a font specific for the kind of Chinese standard (simplified or traditional) you expect.

 

Basically, the simplified Chinese standard comprises two kinds of simplifications. There are the well-known "proper" simplifications where a character is replaced by a different one with a lower number of strokes (like 国 for 國), but there is an additional more subtle set of simplifications which consist in replacing some traditional formal printed variants with similar shapes that are closer to the normal handwritten style. The traditional printed forms are referred to as "old character shapes" 旧字形 (or 旧体字) as opposed to the "new character shapes" 新字形. The so-called old shapes are still standard in the printed traditional Chinese as in yst's image above. A very common example is the radical 辶, which is usually printed with two dots in the top-left corner in traditional Chinese, but only one in simplified Chinese. This also includes characters like 令 and 直. Other common ones affected by this phenomenon are 兑, 起, 户 and 骨. The Wikipedia article 新字形 has a comprehensive list of differences.

 

The problem with these characters is that, unlike proper simplification cases like 国 and 國, these old vs new shapes are usually encoded with the same numeric value, so a given font can only give you one glyph for the likes of 令 and 直. I'm not sure to what extent you can configure your Kindle, but if you could uninstall all the original East Asian fonts that came with it and then install one simplified Chinese font, you'd get the simplified Chinese visual appearance for these characters.

 

There's a few old threads about this issue:

 

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/28549-%E6%96%B0%E6%97%A7%E5%AD%97%E5%BD%A2%E5%AF%B9%E7%85%A7%E8%A1%A8-new-versus-old-style-components/

 

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/31192-%E5%B0%8F%E9%A9%AC%E8%AF%8D%E5%85%B8-oddity/

 

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/35172-different-forms-of-%E5%B0%86-%E5%86%B7-%E7%9B%B4/

 

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/36155-question-regarding-some-simplified-vs-traditional-forms/

 

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/39675-%E5%B0%86-written-in-different-ways/

[Angelina]

Thanks for the insightful answer Jose. 

 

Demonic_Duck, I have seen the shapes in question on the Mainland: KTV with lyrics in traditional characters and very old books written using traditional characters. 

[Sarpedon]

Thanks everyone.

 

I'm using the Kindle in English, so there are only the typical English fonts (Baskerville, Futura, etc.)  Each one of those renders the Chinese characters in the same way.

 

When I get home today, I'll try switching the operating system language to Chinese to see if that makes a difference in the way the characters are rendered.  Since I don't play around in the menus much or use the Kindle for anything other than reading, it probably won't be a big deal to switch back and forth if this corrects my issue.

 

Anyway, I learned something new from this thread and I'll report back if switching to the Chinese language on the OS makes a difference.

[Demonic_Duck]

Demonic_Duck, I have seen the shapes in question on the Mainland: KTV with lyrics in traditional characters and very old books written using traditional characters.

I never claimed they're impossible to find on the mainland, just that the 新字形 forms (thanks for providing the correct terminology @Jose) are much more common, even in printed material, contrary to what the text I quoted suggested.

 

Also, I'm pretty sure the companies that make the videos for KTV are almost all Hong-Kong based. Meanwhile, it makes sense that very old books written before/during the process of simplification will use the old forms.

[Angelina]

Of course, I just thought that it's pretty random that we can find them at KTVs 

[dwq]

I have no experience with Amazon Kindle devices, but this is one area Android in general is seriously lacking.  By default none of the, er, 3, fonts includes Chinese characters, the Chinese characters all falls back to the font "Droid Sans Fallback" and I'm not sure whether it has separate variants for all the different Chinese standards plus Japanese, so you'd be getting only one variant no matter what you set your font and country/language to, and it's 黑體 only so no luck if you want to read in 宋體／明體 unless your application specifically supports adding custom fonts and you or the app can obtain the correct ones at an acceptable price.

 

It is regrettable since we're now getting high DPI screens which can render 宋體／明體 much better than before.

 

(By the way, does anyone knows of an Android web browser that lets you do that? I haven't really looked into it)

 

In contrast, iOS has separate Simplified Chinese / Traditional Chinese / Japanese 黑體 fonts by default, and iOS apps can request additional fonts (more weights / styles / 宋體／明體 etc.) from Apple over the network as necessary.

 

An example is iBooks which support CJK font selection if the epub language is set correctly.

Scroll down and you'll see 黑體／宋體／ 楷體／圓體 are available for traditional Chinese for example.

 

http://www.playpcesor.com/2012/10/ibooks-30.html

 

Reference:

http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/List_of_fonts_included_with_each_device

http://support.apple.com/en-us/ht5878