Newbie Font Questions

[azalin]

Hello, I just got this beautiful black Zaurus but I have a few questions that could not find an answer to with search (but perhaps my search terms were the wrong ones, in that case a simple link to the proper thread would suffice). I hope this is the proper forum to ask my question in, if not then I apologise.

1) When I edit a (latex) file with vi, in the terminal app all my backslashes turn into a yen symbol, is there an easy way to fix this? I tried changing the font in the terminal app where I can choose between fixed, jisupasp, lcfont, micro and mmkjgx (with x a number) but that did not help either.

2) When I view pdf files with qpdf, everything goes fine except formulas. I assume that this is because I am missing some kind of font, is there a way to find out which font this is? How do I install this font and where can I get it from (I have a SuSE distribution on my normal computer so maybe it is somewhere on those CD's)?

3) I read on several places that the NAND memory in the Zaurus can only be written to a certain number of times. Because flash cards are exchangable I am storing all my documents and stuff I am editing on the SD card. But I am afraid some programs save their settings in my home dir automatically. So my question is if the sharp rom with these standard apps takes this into account or I have to copy and then symlink my homedir or something? Are there any other hard to find settings that I can adjust to prevent any writing to the NAND?

Some background on my installation: The Zaurus I have is the C-1000 with a 1Gb SD card, I use the standard Sharp rom still, with the modifications of the installation from Trisoft (who, by the way supplied a very nice manual!). I want to use my Zaurus mainly for writing and reading scientific articles, I have not installed Latex on it yet but found two links on these forums for a distribution (currently I edit the file then copy it to another computer to run latex over it). I plan to stay with the sharp rom for a while until I am comfortable with it and perhaps later switch over to OZ or pdaXrom.

Thank you in advance for answering any of these questions.

[offroadgeek]

Check out this site http://www.users.on.net/~hluc/myZaurus/custom.html#mapping , for installing keyhelper.  It doesn't remap the backslash key by default, but I'm sure you can use keyhelperconf to fix that.  You can get the keyhelper and keyhelperconf ipks from the http://www.zaurususergroup.org/feed/.

Also, you can get a few different fonts that was built for the 3000, but should work fine on the 1000 (as they're almost identical).  fonts.zip

[azalin]

Thank you for the reply! One thing I wonder (I don't have my Zaurus with me right now, so I cannot test this yet) is the following:
The file was originally made on another computer, there it had backslashes in those spots. So even without any editing (I only copied the file from my laptop to the Zaurus's SD card) and merely opening it in vi, the \ characters were shown as Yen's. So I suspect that the keymap is fine, but the font might not be. Therefore I will try your second suggestion first. Once I get to fiddle with my Z again I will let you know how it worked out, thanks for the tips!
edit: And especially thanks for the very nice link (I tried to find something like that with the Zaurus how-to docs and the unofficial faq, but I was looking for C1000 things and should have looked at C3000 too I guess. The wiki at the top should be like that. I should have seen it was work in progress and followed to the source) especially the paragraph about the fonts (above the keymaps) is very useful!

[Meanie]

The Yen signs you see instead of the \ is normal. This is what all the Japanese see on their computers  Their \ always look like the yen sign.
If you open your file in yedit or zedit with utf8 enabled instead of the default euc-jp encoding, you will see the \ again.

[azalin]

I installed the packages in that zip file. The "fixed" and "micro" fonts do have the \ character now (though I am not entirely sure if this fixed it or something else). They are a bit small though but atleast I can edit a latex file now so thanks!

As for the other problem (QPDF not showing math signs) it seems more people have the same issue:
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~univ0103/z-tex/

Both Opera and qpdf refuse to make use of the embedded type 1 fonts, substituting their own naff-looking ones instead. They don't render the symbols at all. (The pdf files created on the Zaurus look just fine on my desktop, viewed with acroread.) Any help with getting that fixed would be very welcome.

There was another thread about this on this forum but there was no solution mentioned for the Sharp rom:
https://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=13026

I noticed there are two versions of QPDF, is there any way to see which you have installed? (Mine came pre-installed by TriSoft). Because I think this might be a hint to the problem (the substitution of fonts in one version of qpdf and because of that mathematic symbols will get messed up).

Once the next release of PdaXrom is out I will probably switch to that one (I read about some little bugs, so guess I'll wait a bit till that is ironed out) and likely do not have these problems anymore anyways.

Thanks everyone for all the tips!

C1000 standard sharp rom, 1 GB SD card.

[jfv]

Install the new version of qpdf and you should see math formulas just fine.

Felipe

[azalin]

The version that was installed indeed was one version older than the newest. So I uninstalled the old and installed the newest one. There were different ipk's to choose from, and after reading the
qpdf2 help forum on sourceforge I thought the freetype version had the biggest chance of working. However, still it seems to go wrong when reading math/physics/chemistry papers/theses with not so often used math symbols in them. The strange thing is, that xpdf on my desktop linux computer does show them correctly, and qpdf2 is based on xpdf. I wonder now if this has something to do with not installed fonts. (Is there any way to find out which fonts are used in a pdf? Perhaps I can copy those fonts somehow to the Z).