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Ipod integration kit and greek fonts

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Old May 21, 2006 | 07:48 PM
  #1  
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Ipod integration kit and greek fonts

Hello all...

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.
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Old May 21, 2006 | 07:52 PM
  #2  
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I belive this is a known problem and there dosen't seem to be a fix for it
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Old May 22, 2006 | 05:22 AM
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Thanks for the answer..
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Old May 22, 2006 | 06:38 AM
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Originally Posted by rino
Hello all...

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
Same with Japanese fonts too. It is a problem with HIGH ASCII characters which are found in UNICODE fonts (single fonts for all languages). Usually English resides in the first 8 bytes of a display set coding. This includes all of the European characters.

Greek and all other languages exist in a higher character set. So the iPOD kit just freaks out and dumps the data.
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Old May 22, 2006 | 11:18 AM
  #5  
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Originally Posted by rino
Hello all...

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
re malaka you are greek ehh ton elleina SO am i
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Old May 22, 2006 | 11:34 AM
  #6  
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Originally Posted by c230 o5
re malaka you are greek ehh ton elleina SO am i


Greetings to New York, patrida!
----------------------------------------
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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Old May 22, 2006 | 11:50 AM
  #7  
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were you from re... and what do you drive?
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Old May 22, 2006 | 12:51 PM
  #8  
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I am curious why a few characters show up, but then the rest are blank. Is it possible that the character codes are triggering the color black? I had this problem with a Chinese character set that turned the screen color to match the background, thus was not visible.

I think Apple might want to help solve the problem, since their equipment is generating the characters.
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Old May 22, 2006 | 01:27 PM
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Interesting…. The point is that so far I have seen all letters of the greek alphabet appearing in the instrument panel screen (ipod menu), in different mp3s, therefore there is no problem in their decoding. Its just that they would never appear together in a complete word.

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...
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Old May 23, 2006 | 01:06 AM
  #10  
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I am using the iPod integration kit and get the same problem with Thai characters in the song titles as well. I figure it's a problem with MB Integration kit in that the command screen in the dash just cannot handle non-romanised characters.
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Old May 23, 2006 | 09:52 PM
  #11  
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Originally Posted by jrustrick
I am using the iPod integration kit and get the same problem with Thai characters in the song titles as well. I figure it's a problem with MB Integration kit in that the command screen in the dash just cannot handle non-romanised characters.
Character sets - the definitive guide

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
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Old May 24, 2006 | 07:07 AM
  #12  
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Originally Posted by Ted Bullo
Character sets - the definitive guide

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
Thanks for this answer... it explains a lot - except of the following:

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....
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Old May 24, 2006 | 06:27 PM
  #13  
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Take a picture, so we can see what you mean. That way, we can have more fun debugging MB's systems at our expense .
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Old May 24, 2006 | 08:18 PM
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Originally Posted by rino
Thanks for this answer... it explains a lot - except of the following:

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....
www.asciitable.com

These characters you have pointed out fall into the extended range from 128 -> 255.
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Old May 26, 2006 | 09:07 PM
  #15  
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Originally Posted by jedcred
Take a picture, so we can see what you mean. That way, we can have more fun debugging MB's systems at our expense .
Will do that, possibly tomorrow... to give us a better idea of the problem.

Thanks!
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Old May 26, 2006 | 09:12 PM
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Can you send some of those MP3s my way? I love Greek pop music, so much better than the US stuff.
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Old May 27, 2006 | 01:23 AM
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All kinds of malakes here! Po Po! pou na kseris,,, Posi elines imaste edo?
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Old May 30, 2006 | 06:48 AM
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geia xara ellhnares! eimaste mpolikoi blepo!!!
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Old May 30, 2006 | 06:49 AM
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mou fenetai tha anoiksoume ellhniko section sto forum!!!
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Old May 31, 2006 | 07:23 PM
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Still working on those photos....

*****Eimaste polloi telika! An kai na po tin alithia to perdikoula mou eihe fanei elliniko apo tin arhi alla ntrapika na rotiso....
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Old May 31, 2006 | 08:30 PM
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Ela pedia - opos fenete pragmatika eimaste boliki ellines sto forum me agapi gia ta amaxia mas..... nomizo oti prepi na kanoume elliko section sto forum sigoura..... maybe ena elliko section me photografies ton amaxion mas na doume an ehoume oli to idio taste....

Gia sas apo Darwin Australia.....

Last edited by C200Sport; May 31, 2006 at 08:37 PM.
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Old Jun 1, 2006 | 09:28 AM
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KAI edo Elleinas KIALOS apo NY............. ellada ellada ellada

olllei kala? ollei kalla? apo kerkyra eimai
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Old Jun 1, 2006 | 09:33 AM
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ellate pediaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
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