Ipod integration kit and greek fonts
A tricky question: I've installed the ipod integration kit, and it works fine (C180 K, 10/2004).
The only thing I haven't sorted out yet is the fonts that the info screen is displaying...
Most mp3s I have are greek, therefore their names and albums are in greek. And although the ipod itself is displaying the greek characters correctly, the car's info screen is not, displaying only 2-3 characters in greek from the full mp3 name, and the rest is blank.
Any ideas that might sort this problem out?
Thanks
Last edited by rino; May 21, 2006 at 07:50 PM.




A tricky question: I've installed the ipod integration kit, and it works fine (C180 K, 10/2004).
The only thing I haven't sorted out yet is the fonts that the info screen is displaying...
Most mp3s I have are greek, therefore their names and albums are in greek. And although the ipod itself is displaying the greek characters correctly, the car's info screen is not, displaying only 2-3 characters in greek from the full mp3 name, and the rest is blank.
Any ideas that might sort this problem out?
Thanks
Greek and all other languages exist in a higher character set. So the iPOD kit just freaks out and dumps the data.
A tricky question: I've installed the ipod integration kit, and it works fine (C180 K, 10/2004).
The only thing I haven't sorted out yet is the fonts that the info screen is displaying...
Most mp3s I have are greek, therefore their names and albums are in greek. And although the ipod itself is displaying the greek characters correctly, the car's info screen is not, displaying only 2-3 characters in greek from the full mp3 name, and the rest is blank.
Any ideas that might sort this problem out?
Thanks
Greetings to New York, patrida!
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With regards to the problem, therefore any changes in the ID3 tags won't do any difference?
Thanks again
Last edited by rino; May 22, 2006 at 11:38 AM.
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I think Apple might want to help solve the problem, since their equipment is generating the characters.
The Best of Mercedes & AMG
Is there a way of actually changing the displaying colour of the characters so that it is not mixed with grey?
Also, I am not sure if Apple is responsible for this situation, as all my mp3's display correctly on the ipod itself. Its the MB/Apple software that doesn't do the trick in my mind...
There is no problem with the integration kit but simply the fact that the COMAND and Kombi don't support any other character sets outside of the extended ASCII character set and a subset of the Japanese characters. A couple of other more common characters may be also supported by full hieroglyphic languages such as Chinese, Russian, Thai etc etc are not.
Generally the main character sets used are:
- ISO8859. These support only the basic characters and only extend to 255 different characters. www.asciitable.com will show you the characters covered in this.
- UTF8. Variable byte length. Can consist of 1 to 3 bytes depending on the character. The 8859 characters fall into the single byte range from 0-255 in this one.
- UCS16/UTF16. Two byte length. This has become pretty common.
UCS16 being two bytes support 65536 different characters. The Japanese market is the biggest market for Mercedes outside of the EU and the US, and so they are lucky enough to have an engineer sit down and write the bitmaps for the supported characters. The Japanese langauge falls into the range from (HEX) 0x3040 -> 0x309F for the Hiragana subset, and Katakana falls into 0x30A0 -> 0x30FF. Thai is at 0x0E00 - > 0xE7F.
Japanese Hiragana being the more popular Japanese subset is usually the most supported. Don't quote me on this but you might find that Katakana may not be fully supported in the COMAND and Kombi.
Ultimately it all depends on what Mercedes want to put into their language character sets. They are not going to put the full 65536 set of bitmaps simply because it takes to long, takes up to much memory, and the majority of characters are never used. The characters that are not supported are either displayed as blank of '?'.
You have to remember that a lot of these systems were designed 5 years ago. Probably the next generation of COMAND's and Kombi will support everything as hardware memory has gotten larger and cheaper over the years, plus emerging markets such as China are buying more Mercedes than ever.
If you want your Thai character set supported - buy a lot of Mercedes and put a business case forward to add the character set in
There is no problem with the integration kit but simply the fact that the COMAND and Kombi don't support any other character sets outside of the extended ASCII character set and a subset of the Japanese characters. A couple of other more common characters may be also supported by full hieroglyphic languages such as Chinese, Russian, Thai etc etc are not.
Generally the main character sets used are:
- ISO8859. These support only the basic characters and only extend to 255 different characters. www.asciitable.com will show you the characters covered in this.
- UTF8. Variable byte length. Can consist of 1 to 3 bytes depending on the character. The 8859 characters fall into the single byte range from 0-255 in this one.
- UCS16/UTF16. Two byte length. This has become pretty common.
UCS16 being two bytes support 65536 different characters. The Japanese market is the biggest market for Mercedes outside of the EU and the US, and so they are lucky enough to have an engineer sit down and write the bitmaps for the supported characters. The Japanese langauge falls into the range from (HEX) 0x3040 -> 0x309F for the Hiragana subset, and Katakana falls into 0x30A0 -> 0x30FF. Thai is at 0x0E00 - > 0xE7F.
Japanese Hiragana being the more popular Japanese subset is usually the most supported. Don't quote me on this but you might find that Katakana may not be fully supported in the COMAND and Kombi.
Ultimately it all depends on what Mercedes want to put into their language character sets. They are not going to put the full 65536 set of bitmaps simply because it takes to long, takes up to much memory, and the majority of characters are never used. The characters that are not supported are either displayed as blank of '?'.
You have to remember that a lot of these systems were designed 5 years ago. Probably the next generation of COMAND's and Kombi will support everything as hardware memory has gotten larger and cheaper over the years, plus emerging markets such as China are buying more Mercedes than ever.
If you want your Thai character set supported - buy a lot of Mercedes and put a business case forward to add the character set in

In the case of greek characters, all of the greek alphabet is displayed in different mp3s, an α here, a β there, a γ elsewhere etc. I have come across all the characters so far, but yet the whole names of mp3s cannot be displayed.
Therefore.. the characters are somehow recognised. Now, why they can't form a word, that beats me....
In the case of greek characters, all of the greek alphabet is displayed in different mp3s, an α here, a β there, a γ elsewhere etc. I have come across all the characters so far, but yet the whole names of mp3s cannot be displayed.
Therefore.. the characters are somehow recognised. Now, why they can't form a word, that beats me....
These characters you have pointed out fall into the extended range from 128 -> 255.
.Thanks!

Gia sas apo Darwin Australia.....
Last edited by C200Sport; May 31, 2006 at 08:37 PM.



