Palm TX and UTF-8 webpages

[roddy]

Is anyone out there using a Palm TX for websurfing in Chinese? I've been getting better results than with the T5, but still not ideal. GB encoded stuff works fine, as usual. UTF-8 stuff however is better than it was (it used to just not display) but is still messing up enough to be a problem, with ???s frequently inserted where characters should be.

Is anyone else seeing this? Any kind of solution? It seems daft that they should have half-implemented unicode support. I've tried playing around with CJKOS options, but with no joy. Using the packaged Blazer browser by the way - although I'd be happy to change if there's another better option.

[sui.generis]

Give Opera Mini a try, there'a brighthander who reported using it for cjk browsing. I understand there's some crashing related to bookmark management, caveat emptor.

[roddy]

Just tried Opera Mini, had to install a java package first. Wasn't too impressed, doesn't render as nicely as Blazer does and feels a bit clunky. Didn't help with Chinese characters but I have now noticed that it only happens with UTF-8 encoded traditional stuff - simplifed UTF-8 pages seem to work fine as far as I can see. So it's maybe a font issue.

[sui.generis]

Can you give some examples of some sites you're trying?

[adrianlondon]

Any update on this?

I'm thinking of buying the Palm TX, but the lack of chinese (web page) support and native PDF reader are counting against it.

[roddy]

Current situation I have is . . .

I have CJKOS 4.61 installed. This gives three character set options, GB, GBK and BIG5. I leave mine set to GB, and have no trouble at all with GB2312 or UTF-8 simplified pages. If I want to view a BIG5 encoded page, or UTF-8 traditional I have to change the character set to BIG5.

If a UTF-8 page has both simplified and traditional characters on it (ie 电灯泡/電燈泡 ) then only the characters from the currently selected set are displayed. Ie, I get 电灯泡/??泡 when set to GB, and 电灯泡/??泡 when set to BIG5.

I don't think you are very often going to need simultaneous simp / trad support, and I'd say for general Chinese browsing then a TX + CJKOS will meet your needs.

PDF file support is pretty poor - there's a Palm version of Acrobat Reader packaged with the TX, but it's clunky and doesn't make use of the full screen.

Also worth noting - the Blazer web browser is great, and I enjoy using it. Importantly, it plays very nicely with Plecodict, meaning that you can browse and look-up / add to flashcards in tandem. I've also got (simplified) Chinese word docs working flawlessly on Docs to Go - I quite often put files I've to translate onto the TX and then dictate a first draft translation into the recorder on my mobile phone. So if you see me on the bus, I'm not mad, I'm multitasking.

Docs to Go is actually my Chinese document reader of Choice now - I used to use Mobipocket, which is great, but this way I can get rid of one app - effectively now I only use Plecodict, Docs to Go (work, most ebooks), eReader (ebooks), and Blazer.

[adrianlondon]

Thanks for that (speedy!) response. I've seen that for PDF documents, it's something they're "working on", but every web forum tends to follow that up with "hahahaha, yeah, they've been saying that for years". palm provide a PDF converter which you need to run on the PDF files on your PC before syncing. Better than nothing.

I'm happy with not being able to see web pages with both simplifeid and traditional at the same time. Well, ok, not exactly happy but, as you say, it's not something which is likely to bother me much.

Seems I do need CJKOS, which is another expense. Could buy the Palm in Beijing where it comes for free, but then someone said it's just a cut-down version without phrase input. And I'd be stuck with a Chinese power adapter. You bought yours in Beijing Roddy, did it come with the American style two-flat-prong type of charger?

I wish they'd put a phone inside the Palm TX. I would have got the Treo 650 except I don't want the keyboard and would miss the TX's larger screen.

[roddy]

It came with a charger and three removable 'heads', so you can use it in just about any kind of socket, I think. Kind of hard to explain.

Would you do much input? I do very little input on mine, even in English - it's a portable document reader, effectively.

[gato]

then someone said it's just a cut-down version without phrase input

That's no problem because you can go to the CJKOS site, download the phrase dictionary file for free and transfer that over to your Palm. I have my CJKOS set to use two-letter pinyin (ShuangPin) for Chinese input. I learned it on the PC first. It's much faster than regular pinyin because all characters can be input with two letters or less. And it's close enough to regular pinyin that it only takes a couple of hours to learn (unlike Wubi).

[adrianlondon]

I wouldn't do much input, Roddy.

I mainly want an organiser to run Plecodict and also to sort my life out (appointment schedules, to-do lists, names/addresses/telephone contacts etc). I'm often a bit disorganised but that's fine here in London as my life is relatively stable and I know what I'm up to most days.

But in China, becoming a student again and having to keep track of every-day timetables and life, I decided pen & paper just weren't fun enough. I like gadgets.

I'm happy using pinyin, which is all I know (I was taught pinyin as a pronunciation tool rather than a typing tool; it's just handy that it works for both!). Happy to learn a quicker version though, provided I don't actually need to learn all the characters again, just a simple rule or two to "translate" between pinyin and this ShuangPin thing.

[gato]

ShuangPin is just an abbreviated version of pinyin.

See this for a description

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:AOGNEV2_SxoJ:www.honco.net/japanese/05/caption/caption-3-04.html+shuangpin+pinyin+syllables+into+initial&hl=zh-CN&ct=clnk&cd=1

Shuangpin method (also known as double-Pinyin)

Fu Liangwen, a researcher at China's Ministry of Machine Industry, devised this system to make Pinyin input more efficient. Shuangpin exploits the divisibility of Pinyin syllables into initial and final sounds, separating these two elements on the keyboard and enabling the user to type a single character with two keystrokes.

See this for the Microsoft Shuangpin layout

http://www.inputking.com/EN/help.php?PHPSESSID=7de9fc8758df6debb91f7cee463765a1#shuangpin

For each key, the initial sound matched to that key is shown in blue, the final sound in red.

There are several different key layouts for ShuangPin, but it's probably best to learn Microsoft's because it's likely to be most widely available.

This example shows how to type the two-character word Zhongguo (China) using Pinyin and Shuangpin:

zhongguo under pinyin would typed with "vsgo" under Shuangpin (Microsoft layout).

v = zh s =ong

g = g o = uo

To practice your shuangpin typing skills, try this program.

http://polycrit.com/typing_test.exe

After decompressing, run 金码练习.exe

It gives a chance to practice until it become automatic and keeps track of your typing speed. After four months of using shuangpin, I find typing in full pinyin a bit of a chore.

[pazu]

I think some Palm users in Taiwan developed a "unicode" solution for PalmOS, using CJKOS, based on the Hong Kong Special Characters Set.

After installing the patch, I can see a unicode website on my Treo 650 Web Blazer like this:

http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E6%B8%A9%E5%AE%B6%E5%AE%9D&variant=zh

For more information, please check:

http://forum.palmislife.com/viewthread.php?tid=22580

The solution isn't perfect, I think you may have some problem if you use Simplified Chinese most of the time, and I strongly recommend that you make a backup before you do anything, and you may have to hard reset your TX to restore everything back to normal...

[roddy]

Few notes, as I've been doing a lot of (self-inflicted) trouble shooting with Chinese language stuff on my TX this last week.

One - if you have a China-purchased Palm, chances are it has CJKOS installed. However, on my TX at least, it's accessed via Preferences, and doesn't appear on the Application menus. This somehow led to me winding up with two versions of CJKOS apparently running simultaneously after Hotsyncing in data from my previous T5 (which had CJKOS installed, but under Applications), which resulted in much crashing, hair-gnashing and pulling of teeth until I figured out what was going on.

Two - there seems to be the possibility of conflict between CJKOS and Blazer, Palm's browser. As far as I can figure out, if you have too many or too large fonts installed, they can take up memory and Blazer will be unable to start. I found this out by not bothering to decide what fonts to install and putting them all on. However, I haven't seen this with any other apps.

Three - default CJKOS installation on Chinese Palms comes with 16pt GB and Big5 fonts. I've added in the 24pt GB font for headlines and stuff, and that works fine.

[got_no_jaffas]

i've got cjkos v4.27 installed on my palm tx but can't seem to get it to work. as far as i can see, there is only the icon CJKOS in the applications with various settings. chinese websites are still a mess & my chinese word document is also a mess. so how do i input chinese characters into memos?

is there something else i am supposed to do because i can't find instructions anywhere!

[roddy]

First off, I'd go through the settings carefully, particularly character set on the first page. If that doesn't help, try and reinstall. Then ask for more help.

[gato]

is there something else i am supposed to do because i can't find instructions anywhere!

Download the program from

http://www.dyts.com/en/index.html

The user manual should be inside the zip file.

[got_no_jaffas]

i downloaded the OS from handago who gave me the old OS. the newer one downloaded from the developer worked fine. can i ask when you transfer chinese documents from your desktop/laptop to the pda via documents-to-go, what file formats you use (ie) word.doc, .txt etc.

[gato]

can i ask when you transfer chinese documents from your desktop/laptop to the pda via documents-to-go, what file formats you use (ie) word.doc, .txt etc.

.doc format. Is Docs-To-Go not working for you? If so, you should try deinstalling both CJKOS and Docs-To-Go, and then reinstalling CJKOS before installing Docs-To-Go. That's what Docs-To-Go's customer support told me when it didn't work for me at first. Apparently the order of installation matters in some cases.

[roddy]

I send the .doc files directly to the Palm via Hotsync, don't convert them at all - works fine for small files, large ones are best broken up into smaller pieces.

[got_no_jaffas]

thanks for the help. not converting the doc files to word-to-go keeps the hanzi. the pinyin looks a bit funny though which is a shame. but it's certainly something. maybe there is something i can do with the font sizes to improve this. i only just got the TX 2 days ago so i am still working my around it with the chinese apps. i don't like the flip case though.