If you’ve bought a globalized Kindle 2 and can’t get a font hack going…
…you have company. In International Kindle 2 First Impressions, Blog Kindle says that “despite the change in software number the fonts are still not Unicode. Unicode font hack for US Kindle 2 doesn’t install on the international version. At first it wouldn’t even recognize the update.
“I’ve played around with Igor’s script and was able to tweak it to produce .BIN files that are recognized as updates by Kindle. However these updates still fail during the installation. Right now I’m trying to figure out why that is and how to fix it. If anyone would like to beat me to it – the updated version of Igor’s script can be downloaded here: kindle_update_tool. You’ll need to have Python installed in order to run it. To build update packages for Kindle 2.2 you need to use -k4 switch. Good luck! Let me know if you figure it out.”
Anyone able to help? Meanwhile here’s a friendly suggestion to Amazon, if it wants make the existing Kindle more competitive with the Nook, the Sony Reader and the rest. Please give readers more font-related options, including the opportunity to bold all text and even vary the amount of bolding.
October 24th, 2009 at 8:32 am
Actually, all Amazon needs to do is support arbitrary TrueType fonts, even if it is just one at a time. There are plenty of heavy and bold fonts to work with out there. Just let me load Times New Roman Bold (or Georgia) as the default font and I’d be good to go.
(Simpler coding, too; Linux already supports TT fonts.)