Palm Encoding Setup

Synchronize your Palm and Mac with full support for national characters!

Supported Encodings

Palm Encoding Setup supports a wide range of encodings:

Central European	ISO	Windows	Mac
Romanian	ISO	Windows
Baltic		Windows
Cyrillic	ISO	Windows	Mac
Cyrillic	DOS	KOI8-R	KOI8-U
Greek		Windows	Mac
Turkish	ISO	Windows
Arabic		Windows
Hebrew	ISO	Windows
Chinese Traditional	Big 5	Big 5 HK SCS
Chinese Simplified	EUC (“GB2312”)	GBK (Windows)
Japanese	EUC	Shift-JIS
Korean	EUC (“KSC5601”)
Thai		Windows
Unicode	UTF-16*	UTF-8*
* Japanese EUC and Unicode encodings are not supported by the original Palm Desktop conduits.

Localizations and Encodings

A localization can usually be purchased together with a Palm, it always includes national alphabet character support and usually a translated interface for the most commonly used applications. If you do not have a localization, you can contact your retailer or pick one of the following:

Product (Manufacturer)	Min. Palm OS version	Free	Supported Languages
CJKOS (DYTS)	5.x	No	Chinese, Japanese, Korean
CHOS (Waterworld)	?	No	Chinese
KOSPI (?)	?	Yes	Korean (Unicode)
APOS (IAI)	?	No	Arabic
ThaiHack (PDA ThaiPalm)	5.x	No	Thai
CyrHack (T. Tashpulatov)	5.x	Yes	Russian
Locale (RedGrep)	5.x	No	(see bellow)
PiLoc (Paragon)	5.x	No	(see bellow)
Interpilot (S. Menshikov)	4.1	Yes	(see bellow)
Locale supports: Czech, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Croatian. Interpilot supports: Greek, Turkish, Czech, Polish, Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Croatian and Ukrainian. PiLoc supports: Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Mongolian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

If you already have a localization installed and you do not know which encoding it uses, look in the documentation you received along with the localization. If the documentation doesn't mention any encoding, it should be the Windows encoding for your region.

Note: Paragon claims to support Mac OS with a pseudo-encoding they call “Mac+”, this encoding is incompatible with real Mac encodings supported by Apple, Inc. These encodings were meant as a convenient solution for Palm Desktop users and will never be compatible with Apple iSync, Address Book and iCal, with e-books and other electronic texts. Moreover they make it impossible to share data including national characters with other Palm users who use standard encodings. However, any other encodings supported by Paragon's PiLoc can be used with Palm Encoding Setup.

No matter which encoding you choose, it is very probable that sooner or later you will need to read a text or an electronic book in the Palm Doc format which was created in a different encoding. For this purpose, a freeware application has been developed called Palm Doc Converter.

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