Font, ScreenSaver & USBNetwork Hacks for Kindle 2.x, 3.x & 4.x - Page 24

NiLuJe · 07-30-2010, 11:27 AM

@meem: None. But if you happen to know a good & complete Latin+Arabic/Hebrew free font family, I'll happily convert/package it

.

@Balerion: Yeah, I may not have been very clear in my answer ^^. What I meant is that it's doable in this very specific case (override Sans_BoldItalic), because it's used almost nowhere else except for displaying the Collections, so you're not 'messing up' part of the styling in your books or the Kindle UI.

So, you can safely override *only* Sans_BoldItalic, but you can override it with *whatever* font you like, not necessarily Sans_Bold or Sans_Regular

(for example, if wanted to make the books title & authors in the Home screens non bold, that wouldn't be so nice, you'd have to sacrifice the Bold styling in your books, because the font used is Serif_Bold, but it's the font also used to display bold styling in your books/dictionaries).

meem · 07-30-2010, 01:42 PM

The main problem for Arabic, Hebrew, Parsian, Thai and Urdu is those languages needs RTL (Right to Left) support, in regular Linux it's done with fribidi (Unicode BiDirectional algorithm library).

So, can anyone help about this ?

NiLuJe · 07-30-2010, 02:31 PM

Is there a legacy way of displaying Arabic script on computers without RTL support?

Because hacking up fribidi support is probably not gonna happen... ^^

meem · 07-30-2010, 04:01 PM

I have a small and simple script before to support Arabic in Xfree86 or Xorg with KDE 3 if Arabic or Unicode fonts installed on the system.

I know this will not work here but maybe it gives someone any idea..

PHP Code:


			
#!/bin/sh

#----------------------------------------------------

# Arabic support for Linux

# Written by: Meem - http://Arabic.sf.net/

#----------------------------------------------------

# export HOSTNAME="Arabic-Linux" 

echo -en "\n"

echo "[1;32mEnable [1;31m([1;33m[1;33mArabic[1;31m)[1;32m Support and Windows file systems encoding ..[0;37m"

#/sbin/modprobe msdos 2>/dev/null

#/sbin/modprobe vfat 2>/dev/null

#/sbin/modprobe ntfs 2>/dev/null

/sbin/modprobe nls_cp864 2>/dev/null

/sbin/modprobe nls_iso8859-6 2>/dev/null

/sbin/modprobe nls_utf8 2>/dev/null



# Unicode Locale environment variables (See: Unicode HowTo):

export LANG=ar_SA.UTF-8

export LANGUAGE='ar:ar_SA.UTF-8:en:C:en_US.UTF-8'

export LANGUAGELIST='ar:ar_SA:en:C'

export LC_ALL=

export LC_CTYPE="ar_SA.UTF-8"

export LC_COLLATE="ar_SA.UTF-8"

export LC_TIME="ar_SA.UTF-8"

export LC_NUMERIC="ar_SA.UTF-8"

export LC_MONETARY="ar_SA.UTF-8"

export LC_MESSAGES="ar_SA.UTF-8"

export LC_PAPER="ar_SA.UTF-8"

export LC_NAME="ar_SA.UTF-8"

export LC_ADDRESS="ar_SA.UTF-8"

export LC_TELEPHONE="ar_SA.UTF-8"

export LC_IDENTIFICATION="ar_SA.UTF-8"



export LOCALE=ar_SA.UTF-8

export FALLBACKLOCALE=C

export COUNTRY="sa"



export G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1

export CHARSET=ISO_8859-6

export OUTPUT_CHARSET=UTF-8

#export LESSCHARSET=UTF-8

echo -en "\n"



#echo "[1;32mSpecify Arabic keyboard [0;39m([1monly in X11[0;39m).."

setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us,ar -variant ,digits 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null

setxkbmap -option grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp:grp_led:scroll 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null

echo -en "\n"



echo "[1;32mSet [1;33mArabic[1;32m for [1;33mKDE[1;32m .. [0;39m"

export KDE_LANG=ar

export KDE_UTF8_FILENAMES=true



# "localedef" command does not work with some systems - use it for one time as root.

# localedef -v -c -i ar -f UTF-8 ar_SA.UTF-8

echo -en "\n"



# start the daemon to recreate fstab if a device is plugged.

# I know that it's not the best idea to use bash script for this,

# but it's better then nothing for now

# /usr/bin/mntall &

echo "[1;32mMount disk volumes with [1;33mArabic[1;32m filenames .. [0;39m"

#/usr/bin/fstab-create -m

# umount -a -t vfat,ntfs

# mount -a -t vfat,ntfs

sleep 2 && clear

echo " "

NiLuJe · 07-30-2010, 04:13 PM

That's just setting up the locales, vfat charsets & keyboard mapping

.

meem · 07-30-2010, 05:20 PM

Yes, as I wrotee above:
I know this will not work here but maybe it gives someone any idea.

sebchan · 07-31-2010, 09:44 AM

I have a Kindle 2 International. I just upgraded the software to version 2.5.4. I just want to install the screensaver heck. I followed the instruction and copied the bin file to the root, as well as the linkss folder.
However, after I "Update" the Kindle, it failed during the updating process. It has U007 on the bottom left hand corner.
What have I done wrong?

NiLuJe · 07-31-2010, 12:57 PM

You probably didn't apply the jailbreak hack first.

sebchan · 08-02-2010, 07:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

You probably didn't apply the jailbreak hack first.

Many thanks! It is working now!!

irha · 08-02-2010, 10:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

@irha: Yeah, there's that, and there was a bug in the first version where if the usbnet directory didn't exist, the logfile wasn't ceated, so that was even more confusing

. That's fixed now.
Err, about the ss, sorry, it's been a while... Do you have any issue left, or is it working?

The install seemed to have worked, as I got a log with no errors and "Done!" at the end. However, I don't see a new network adapter getting recognized (windows 7) after a sequence of ";debugOn", "`usbNetwork" and "`usbQa" commands.

BTW, at first I got errors due to missing /mnt/us/usbnet/bin/usbstorage, even though I thought I had the latest version, but when I searched I found that this problem was already reported and wasfixed, so I re-downloaded the same file and it worked. Apparently, it was fixed without a version bump, so I thought I had the latest. I guess you just forgot to bump up the version.

NiLuJe · 08-02-2010, 10:46 PM

You don't need the `usbQa command anymore. Appart from that, never tried this on Windows, so no idea how Windows handles this, sorry

.

And yeah, it was updated without a bump, because there wasn't really any functionnality enhancements, just a leftover I forgot to remove in the install script

.

Pushka · 08-02-2010, 11:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Balerion

So... for anyone that wants to get rid of the italics in the collections names... now you know you can (if you didn't know already that is)

..

Yep, that looks good for me! Thankyou!

Lero · 08-03-2010, 11:48 AM

Great job with the font hack!

As someone who has bought Kindle DXi mainly for reading PDF articles, magazines and books I was disappointed in the low contrast of the text in PDFs. Essentially it's gray on a light-gray background.

As a solution I tried with the font hack. I tried default font pack and Droid Sans font pack. Whereas fonts in other places have changed, in PDFs the fonts are still the same - certain serif types. If I could make them bold it would already be much better.

Does anyone have experience with this?

NiLuJe · 08-03-2010, 12:59 PM

Most PDFs embed a subset of the font they use. AFAIK, we can't override that on the Kindle to make them use the system's fonts, sorry

.

If you can modify the source PDF, you might want to try to recreating it without embedded fonts (if that's even possible, I'm not that familiar with the PDF specs).

vas14 · 08-03-2010, 02:18 PM

NiLuJe, thanks a lot for your work. Your font package made my Kindle experience much better. I would like to contribute my personal favourite font package, that's not currently uploaded to your page:

http://rapidshare.com/files/410832073/DroidStyles.zip

The first one is merely a collection of droid fonts with styles, that supports cyrillic characters. The second one is my favourite, where the regular font is replaced with the bold one. I use it with text size 3.

Again, much appreciate your work.

07-30-2010, 11:27 AM	#346
NiLuJe BLAM! Posts: 13,478 Karma: 26012494 Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Paris, France Device: Kindle 2i, 3g, 4, 5w, PW, PW2, PW5; Kobo H2O, Forma, Elipsa, Sage, C2E	@meem: None. But if you happen to know a good & complete Latin+Arabic/Hebrew free font family, I'll happily convert/package it . @Balerion: Yeah, I may not have been very clear in my answer ^^. What I meant is that it's doable in this very specific case (override Sans_BoldItalic), because it's used almost nowhere else except for displaying the Collections, so you're not 'messing up' part of the styling in your books or the Kindle UI. So, you can safely override only Sans_BoldItalic, but you can override it with whatever font you like, not necessarily Sans_Bold or Sans_Regular (for example, if wanted to make the books title & authors in the Home screens non bold, that wouldn't be so nice, you'd have to sacrifice the Bold styling in your books, because the font used is Serif_Bold, but it's the font also used to display bold styling in your books/dictionaries). Last edited by NiLuJe; 07-30-2010 at 11:30 AM.

07-30-2010, 02:31 PM	#348
NiLuJe BLAM! Posts: 13,478 Karma: 26012494 Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Paris, France Device: Kindle 2i, 3g, 4, 5w, PW, PW2, PW5; Kobo H2O, Forma, Elipsa, Sage, C2E	Is there a legacy way of displaying Arabic script on computers without RTL support? Because hacking up fribidi support is probably not gonna happen... ^^ Last edited by NiLuJe; 07-30-2010 at 04:17 PM.

07-30-2010, 04:01 PM	#349
meem A Reader who can think..! Posts: 257 Karma: 108298 Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Earth Planet Device: Kindle 3 WiFi - Kindle DX (B004)	I have a small and simple script before to support Arabic in Xfree86 or Xorg with KDE 3 if Arabic or Unicode fonts installed on the system. I know this will not work here but maybe it gives someone any idea.. PHP Code: #!/bin/sh #---------------------------------------------------- # Arabic support for Linux # Written by: Meem - http://Arabic.sf.net/ #---------------------------------------------------- # export HOSTNAME="Arabic-Linux" echo -en "\n" echo "[1;32mEnable [1;31m([1;33m[1;33mArabic[1;31m)[1;32m Support and Windows file systems encoding ..[0;37m" #/sbin/modprobe msdos 2>/dev/null #/sbin/modprobe vfat 2>/dev/null #/sbin/modprobe ntfs 2>/dev/null /sbin/modprobe nls_cp864 2>/dev/null /sbin/modprobe nls_iso8859-6 2>/dev/null /sbin/modprobe nls_utf8 2>/dev/null # Unicode Locale environment variables (See: Unicode HowTo): export LANG=ar_SA.UTF-8 export LANGUAGE='ar:ar_SA.UTF-8:en:C:en_US.UTF-8' export LANGUAGELIST='ar:ar_SA:en:C' export LC_ALL= export LC_CTYPE="ar_SA.UTF-8" export LC_COLLATE="ar_SA.UTF-8" export LC_TIME="ar_SA.UTF-8" export LC_NUMERIC="ar_SA.UTF-8" export LC_MONETARY="ar_SA.UTF-8" export LC_MESSAGES="ar_SA.UTF-8" export LC_PAPER="ar_SA.UTF-8" export LC_NAME="ar_SA.UTF-8" export LC_ADDRESS="ar_SA.UTF-8" export LC_TELEPHONE="ar_SA.UTF-8" export LC_IDENTIFICATION="ar_SA.UTF-8" export LOCALE=ar_SA.UTF-8 export FALLBACKLOCALE=C export COUNTRY="sa" export G_BROKEN_FILENAMES=1 export CHARSET=ISO_8859-6 export OUTPUT_CHARSET=UTF-8 #export LESSCHARSET=UTF-8 echo -en "\n" #echo "[1;32mSpecify Arabic keyboard [0;39m([1monly in X11[0;39m).." setxkbmap -model pc104 -layout us,ar -variant ,digits 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null setxkbmap -option grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp:grp_led:scroll 1> /dev/null 2> /dev/null echo -en "\n" echo "[1;32mSet [1;33mArabic[1;32m for [1;33mKDE[1;32m .. [0;39m" export KDE_LANG=ar export KDE_UTF8_FILENAMES=true # "localedef" command does not work with some systems - use it for one time as root. # localedef -v -c -i ar -f UTF-8 ar_SA.UTF-8 echo -en "\n" # start the daemon to recreate fstab if a device is plugged. # I know that it's not the best idea to use bash script for this, # but it's better then nothing for now # /usr/bin/mntall & echo "[1;32mMount disk volumes with [1;33mArabic[1;32m filenames .. [0;39m" #/usr/bin/fstab-create -m # umount -a -t vfat,ntfs # mount -a -t vfat,ntfs sleep 2 && clear echo " " Last edited by meem; 07-30-2010 at 05:20 PM.

08-03-2010, 11:48 AM	#358
Lero Junior Member Posts: 2 Karma: 10 Join Date: Aug 2010 Device: Kindle DXi	Fonts in PDFs Great job with the font hack! As someone who has bought Kindle DXi mainly for reading PDF articles, magazines and books I was disappointed in the low contrast of the text in PDFs. Essentially it's gray on a light-gray background. As a solution I tried with the font hack. I tried default font pack and Droid Sans font pack. Whereas fonts in other places have changed, in PDFs the fonts are still the same - certain serif types. If I could make them bold it would already be much better. Does anyone have experience with this?

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07-30-2010, 01:42 PM	#347
meem A Reader who can think..! Posts: 257 Karma: 108298 Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Earth Planet Device: Kindle 3 WiFi - Kindle DX (B004)	The main problem for Arabic, Hebrew, Parsian, Thai and Urdu is those languages needs RTL (Right to Left) support, in regular Linux it's done with fribidi (Unicode BiDirectional algorithm library). So, can anyone help about this ?

07-30-2010, 04:13 PM	#350
NiLuJe BLAM! Posts: 13,478 Karma: 26012494 Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Paris, France Device: Kindle 2i, 3g, 4, 5w, PW, PW2, PW5; Kobo H2O, Forma, Elipsa, Sage, C2E	That's just setting up the locales, vfat charsets & keyboard mapping .

07-30-2010, 05:20 PM	#351
meem A Reader who can think..! Posts: 257 Karma: 108298 Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Earth Planet Device: Kindle 3 WiFi - Kindle DX (B004)	Yes, as I wrotee above: I know this will not work here but maybe it gives someone any idea.

07-31-2010, 09:44 AM	#352
sebchan Junior Member Posts: 9 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2010 Device: Kindle 2 International	I have a Kindle 2 International. I just upgraded the software to version 2.5.4. I just want to install the screensaver heck. I followed the instruction and copied the bin file to the root, as well as the linkss folder. However, after I "Update" the Kindle, it failed during the updating process. It has U007 on the bottom left hand corner. What have I done wrong?

07-31-2010, 12:57 PM	#353
NiLuJe BLAM! Posts: 13,478 Karma: 26012494 Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Paris, France Device: Kindle 2i, 3g, 4, 5w, PW, PW2, PW5; Kobo H2O, Forma, Elipsa, Sage, C2E	You probably didn't apply the jailbreak hack first.

08-02-2010, 10:46 PM	#356
NiLuJe BLAM! Posts: 13,478 Karma: 26012494 Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Paris, France Device: Kindle 2i, 3g, 4, 5w, PW, PW2, PW5; Kobo H2O, Forma, Elipsa, Sage, C2E	You don't need the `usbQa command anymore. Appart from that, never tried this on Windows, so no idea how Windows handles this, sorry . And yeah, it was updated without a bump, because there wasn't really any functionnality enhancements, just a leftover I forgot to remove in the install script .

08-03-2010, 12:59 PM	#359
NiLuJe BLAM! Posts: 13,478 Karma: 26012494 Join Date: Jun 2010 Location: Paris, France Device: Kindle 2i, 3g, 4, 5w, PW, PW2, PW5; Kobo H2O, Forma, Elipsa, Sage, C2E	Most PDFs embed a subset of the font they use. AFAIK, we can't override that on the Kindle to make them use the system's fonts, sorry . If you can modify the source PDF, you might want to try to recreating it without embedded fonts (if that's even possible, I'm not that familiar with the PDF specs).

08-03-2010, 02:18 PM	#360
vas14 Junior Member Posts: 1 Karma: 10 Join Date: Aug 2010 Device: Kindle 2I	NiLuJe, thanks a lot for your work. Your font package made my Kindle experience much better. I would like to contribute my personal favourite font package, that's not currently uploaded to your page: http://rapidshare.com/files/410832073/DroidStyles.zip The first one is merely a collection of droid fonts with styles, that supports cyrillic characters. The second one is my favourite, where the regular font is replaced with the bold one. I use it with text size 3. Again, much appreciate your work.