Kindle Fonts

[uclaser]

Sorry if this may sound noobish. My K3 is my first and only reader and after reading a number of different books I noticed that each book has a different level of font clarity. I downloaded the Sherlock Homes collection from mobileread and compared it to the same full collection I bought from Amazon. The one from mobileread seems to have a darker font. Is this a common occurence or its just my eyes playing a trick? My copy of the Homeland(Drizzt series) has a very very dark font, it is as though it is in bold.
So the question is, is there any method to change the native font type of a particular epub/mobi file before uploading it into my kindle via calibre?

Thank you so much.

[TheKindleWorm]

Hmm I'm sure I read somewhere that fonts could be hardcoded into ebooks - perhaps in the underlying HTML source code before the book is converted to a mobi file. Not sure if there is a program that can do this for you or whether it has to be done by hand.

I'm not sure if you can embed fonts directly into a MOBI book. I suspect not, but I've never researched it. You can embed fonts in PDFs, ePubs, and some ebook formats. MOBI seems so limited though that I would be surprised if you could.

However, you can modify the CSS stylesheet when converting a book to MOBI and change the font weight, or even the font families as far as that goes. Changing the font weight to bold would make the text darker on a Kindle. Changing the font family will have no effect unless the Kindle was hacked and those fonts were added to it, but you cannot hack a K3 yet.

In calibre on the Look and Feel tab, I add the following in the Extra CSS field

body { font-weight: bold; }

This makes all the text in the book bold assuming a specific CSS style doesn't override it. But this requires a non-DRMed book.

[NiLuJe]

(Crappy) Topaz book?

Because in a MOBI book, (on a Kindle), you *can't* change/embed the typeface, just the styling.

[uclaser]

ahh... thanks for the insights guy..I will try the CSS first and I will give an update later

[jgumphress]

I purchased the ebook Spurgeon's Morning and Evening from Amazon and the font looks like an old manual type writer.

Sounds like you got a dreaded Topaz book. What is the file extension name?

[osnova]

It must be one of topaz format books (azw1, azw2). I try to stay away from those.

[uclaser]

hmm.. the file extension is.azw so I am guessing that it is a normal azw file. Anyway, I tried resending the file with the added CSS body { font-weight: bold; } from epub to mobi. There wasn't any change on the font

[jgumphress]

It is azw file, the same as the KJV Bible.

[NiLuJe]

Note that the file extension doesn't necessarily mean something.

[jimad]

I'm having some luck setting Kindle, EPUB, and HTML fonts in a consistent non-ugly way indirectly using CSS:

<style type="text/css">
p
{
text-indent: 0em;
margin-top: 1em;
margin-bottom: 0em;
}

.fItalic { font-style:italic; }
.fBold { font-weight: bold; }
.fMono { font-family: monospace; }
.fMonoItalic { font-family: monospace; font-style:italic; }
.fMonoBold { font-family: monospace; font-weight: bold; }
.fNormal { }
...

<p class="fMonoBold">This text in Monospace Bold!</p>

Haven't figured out a way to get to the new sans-serif non-monospace fonts in Kindle though ??

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by jimad

Haven't figured out a way to get to the new sans-serif non-monospace fonts in Kindle though ??

You've tried the following...?

font-family: sans-serif;

[jimad]

Originally Posted by DMSmillie

You've tried the following...?

font-family: sans-serif;

Yes, of course, I can put the following snippets into an HTML

<p style="font-family: sans-serif"> This is a test. </p>

<p style="font-family: serif"> This is a test. </p>

and it "works fine" in an HTML browser, compile it to MOBI using Kindlegen and Kindles ignore one's font-family specifications.