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What happened to Japanese in pdfs with iOS6?

I have more than a thousand pdfs that are lesson notes for these Japanese language classes I'm taking in my iPad 3rd generation.


The text in these are a mixture of kanji, kana and romaji (English text). I upgraded to iOS6 yesterday and now none of the Japanese text is showing up in my pdfs. I have an ebook that does have the text, but the pdfs do not.


These were working fine before iOS6 was installed. Is there any way to fix these without having to open each PDF and doing a 'save as' to embed the fonts into the files? Like I said, there are more than a thousand of these on my iPad, and using it for my lesson notes is the major reason why I got the iPad in the first place (not to mention the fact that this and GoodReader are the two apps I use most heavily).


I even changed the iPad's system language to Japanese and still no kana.


Help?????

iPad, iOS 6, 16GB

Posted on Sep 20, 2012 12:47 PM

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20 replies

Sep 20, 2012 2:50 PM in response to MrsSpooky

I believe japanesepod101 releases two versions of their pdfs, one is text based and the other is image based. The image based one should work. The downside is that it takes up a lot more space. I had recently purged all the image based pdfs from iTunes since the text one used to work just fine and it looked much better. I suppose I could re-download some of them as a workaround.


I'll report it as well. This is very frustrating! I wish I hadn't upgraded so quickly.

Sep 20, 2012 3:03 PM in response to Dave Low

I haven't seen the image based lesson notes, will have to look.


What I like to do is hightly and copy kanji from the dialogs, then past them into what used to be called Kotoba! (now i mi wa) so I can get more information about them. It worked perfectly.


I do have a book from japanesepod101, and that one still had the kanji in it - the text must be embedded in that doc, where it isn't in the pdfs.


I know, I wish I could have waited too, but how could we know that they were going to break something that's always worked?


LIke I said, it's not just iBooks, it's GoodReader too, and at least one other pdf reader I installed.

Sep 20, 2012 3:18 PM in response to MrsSpooky

True, we couldn't have known. But if I could have forced myself to wait a few months before upgrading, maybe it would have been fixed by then.


Well, we get to see how good Apple support really is. If this takes very long to fix, I may have to consider switching to a non iOS device 😮.


The image based pdfs are titled as Lesson Notes Lite. The Lite suffix denotes that it is image based. Unfortunately, you will not be able to copy and paste from it though.


Edit: I just lied... I downloaded one of the Lite pdfs and they are not image based. They just use a different font. However, it is a much larger pdf. Maybe it has embedded fonts? I don't know, I'll have to try it out.

Sep 20, 2012 3:47 PM in response to Dave Low

I verified that I can copy the characters on the lite versions, which is encouraging 🙂


It's just that I set up a feed and downloaded ALL the lesson notes. I looked at the feed options and there wasn't an option to get the lesson note lite versions, just "all PDF" or lesson notes or kanji closeup. You don't get the lite version via the feeds, and I'm afraid it would take longer to download them all individually than to wait for Apple to fix it.

Dec 2, 2012 7:45 PM in response to MrsSpooky

Just wanted to reply that I have this issue as well with PDFs from JapanesePod101. The Lite version does seem to work, but almost all of their PDFs are not the embedded version.


I knew it was working before and just couldn't figure out why I was having issues now. Glad I found this thread and hopefully we get our functionality back sometime soon!

Dec 2, 2012 8:21 PM in response to tashpool

The Adobe reader DOES display the fonts where the other readers don't (I tried about a half dozen).


I reported it to GoodReader (my favorite app) and they seem to be content to just sit back and let it go - wait for Apple to fix their broken OS. I even sent them a lesson note pdf with a "here, Adobe Reader can display the fonts" hoping they'd have something they can test a fix with.


I like GoodReader (and iBooks) because you can highlight and copy individual kanji characters and paste them into imiwa? to look more into their meanings and readings. Can't do that with Adobe.


Right now I have all of japanesepod101's lesson notes on my iPad. I'd have to delete them all from the pad and the computer then download all the lesson note light versions, then upload them all to the pad and reorganize them again. That will take a full day (there are almost 2000 of them).


I was disappointed when 6.01 came out and it didn't fix this. I wish there was some way to report a problem with the OS, because it's not iBooks that has the problem.

What happened to Japanese in pdfs with iOS6?

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