Symptom

When you copy a TextEdit note to iPod that has Japanese, Korean, or traditional or simplified Chinese characters with UTF8 text encoding, the note does not appear on iPod's display.

Products affected

* iPod Software 2.0
* TextEdit

Solution

The iPod Note Reader (Extras > Notes on iPod) can display any plain text file. To display a file with characters from these languages, make sure you are using the right text encoding, or use an application that can save the note as Unicode text.

Additional information

By default all note files are considered to be encoded in Latin1, unless the iPod language preference is set to Japanese, Korean, or traditional or simplified Chinese, in which case all note files are assumed to be in that encoding.

Note: You can tag a note file with a different encoding by including the following line: <?xml encoding="MacJapanese"?>

iPod handles these encodings: Latin1, MacRoman, MacJapanese, Korean, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, UTF8 Unicode and UTF16 Unicode.

iPod recognizes these encoding names:
For Latin1: iso-8859-1, Latin-1.
For MacRoman: x-Mac-Roman, Mac, Macintosh.
For MacJapanese: x-Mac-Japanese, Mac-Japanese, MacJapanese, Shift-JIS, Shift_JIS.
For traditional Chinese: x-Mac-Chinesetrad, Mac-Chinesetrad , BIG5, CN-BIG5.
For simplified Chinese: x-Mac-Chinesesimp, Mac-Chinesesimp, EUC-CN.
For Korean: x-Mac-Korean, Mac-Korean, EUC-KR.
For UTF8 Unicode: UTF8, UTF-8.
For UTF16 Unicode: UTF16, UTF-16, UCS2, Unicode.

Note: Each line lists multiple names for the same encoding, not separate encodings.

The only way to display multiple encodings in the same note is to use Unicode.