I wonder what fonts are built-in and if there are any that support Unicode.

Anyone ??? :shy:

The manual mentions Bitstream Swiss and Dutch, so I guess those are present. They also mention Bitstream Font Fusion, which seems to be a font renderer (Freetype being not good enough?). Samples of Swiss and Dutch on the web seem to have only latin characters.

I wonder what fonts are built-in and if there are any that have all UTF-8/UTF-16 characters.

Since the Reader is marketed only in the US, don't expect anything beyond support of US characters. Don't expect Unicode of any kind. (UTF-8 and UTF-16 are coding systems, not character tables.)

@igorsk:
Thank for the hint about Betstream fonts. There are several fonts on their website that support Cyrrilic, but I'm not sure if any of them got into the Reader.

@ath:
Unicode seems to be so "must have" feature really. Even for US market it should support it, lets say I would like to buy English-Russian Dictionary or Swahili Cookbook.

Well, BBeB (LRF) format itself is definitely Unicode and it supports embedded fonts, so in the worst case you'll just have to include fonts with your books.

Thanks to Igorsk hint about CONNECT software, and some digging, here is an update on built-in fonts.

CONNECT Software is pretty accurate in rendering pages, so one can use it instead of Reader to check how book will look like.

It comes with three fonts located in ..\Data\fonts\ directory

tt0003m_.ttf: Swis721 BT Roman (looks like Arial)
tt0011m_.ttf: Dutch801 Rm BT Roman (looks like Times New Roman)
tt0419m_.ttf: Courier10 BT Roman (well, what do you think?)

All fonts made by Bitstream Inc.

All fonts have following ASCII(?) charsets
- Western
- Greek
- Turkish
- Baltic
- Central European

CONNECT Software and Reader display those charsets just fine.

kconfig.xml has following instructions (I believe this is how Reader replaces fonts it doesn't have with built-in ones to display RTF files. See examples (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=40263&postcount=2) of such replacements.)

<extension href="[applicationPath]textenginefreetype"/>
<ui>
<font face="Swis721 BT" href="[bbebFontPath]" engine="FreeType">
<family name="roman" uses="Dutch801 Rm BT"/>
<family name="swiss" uses="Swis721 BT"/>
<family name="modern" uses="Courier10 BT"/>
<family name="script" uses="Dutch801 Rm BT"/>
<family name="decor" uses="Dutch801 Rm BT"/>
<family name="tech" uses="Courier10 BT"/>
</font>
</ui>


I hope Sony can replace built-in fonts with ones (hint Unicode) that have more charsets.

They did say pretty clearly that they have the ability to add new fonts. I don't know what sorts of things might move them to do so, however. :beam:

Thank you, Nathan, it's good to know they can do it. Questions are what fonts and when :)

I think the bigger question might be "if." :beam:

It's sad that Sony doesn't realize the US market is very multilingual these days! Unicode fonts should be absolutely mandatory for a product like this.

Take a look at the internal content (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=8051) of the Reader (thanks to igorsk). One directory holds the fonts:


/opt/sony/ebook/FONT
/opt/sony/ebook/FONT/tt0003m_.ttf
/opt/sony/ebook/FONT/tt0011m_.ttf
/opt/sony/ebook/FONT/tt0419m_.ttf

The very same fonts (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=41779&postcount=6), I should add :)

The very same fonts (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=41779&postcount=6), I should add :)
Oops, I missed that. Yes, these are the same fonts ;)

So, does this suggest that if we could drop fonts in those directories (Reader & PC side), we could add our own fonts to the list, then? :grin:

Probably not. I've tried adding new font on PC side last night, but CONNECT wouldn't show Russian characters in RTF book. May be there are some config files need to be updated as well.