Cyrillic fonts, ebooks, and handheld computers

[Chris Tessone]

Dear Eliot,

My first suggestion, as someone who also reads books in Cyrillic on the
Palm, is to try MakeDoc (I found one version at
http://www.pdacentral.com/palm/preview/34658.html, but it's "enhanced",
which sometimes means "some stuff added, other things broken").  :-)  It
is not made to support Cyrillic, but it works out anyway.  It simply
converts the Cyrillic characters to their extended-ASCII equivalents
(what you see when your encoding is set to "Western European" and you
try to read a Russian page).  The resulting PDB file should work just
fine.

Two other things: have you seen the library at http://www.palmpc.ru/ ?
I found it pretty good, but then I was very into Akunin and such at the
time.  There isn't as much in the way of "klassika" there.  The second
solution I can think of is to try lib.ru.  You can get a TealDoc version
of any file by simply clicking "ogl" (oglavlenie) next to any text and
scrolling down to the bottom of the screen.  TealDoc isn't as nice as
iSilo, but it's workable.

Good luck!

Chris

--
Christopher Tessone
tessone at polyglut.net
BA Student, Knox College
http://www.polyglut.net/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Slavic & East European Languages and Literature list
> [mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU] On Behalf Of Eliot Borenstein
> Sent: Friday, November 01, 2002 2:21 PM
> To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
> Subject: [SEELANGS] Cyrillic fonts, ebooks, and handheld computers
>
> Here's my highly geeky question:  I use various Cyrillic fonts on a
Mac
> (OS X.2--no, I haven't worked all the kinks out of it yet).  I also
> download Russian ebooks to read on my Treo (running a Palm OS),
usually
> using Palm Reader Lite, but sometimes a clunkier program called iSilo
> (there's a site at www.palmpc.ru/ that's quite good, though I've only
> been able to download the files successfully on a Wintel machine,and
> iSilo books are also available at
> http://palmlib.palmclub.ru/lib/libhome.htm--both are free). So far, so
> good:  my Treo handles Cyrillic just fine thanks to CyrHack II (the
> software can be downloaded for free at
> http://www.enlight.ru/pilot/cyrhack/about.html).
>
> The problem arises when I try to download e-texts from various web
> sites (particularly the Moshkov e-library) and use them on my handheld
> computer.  I've tried using the Palm eBook studio, but when I try to
> make a pdb or prc file containing Cyrillic, it turns into gibberish
> (big surprise there--the program isn't designed with Cyrillic support
> in mind).  Is there anyone out there who might know how I can get
> around this problem?
>
> Please reply to me directly and spare everyone else the boring
details,
> and I'll post a summary of all the responses I get.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Eliot Borenstein,  Chair
> Dept. of Russian & Slavic Studies
> New York University
>
>
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