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Old 03-05-2009, 07:11 PM   #1
peggynek
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Embedding fonts to Kindle books

Hi guys,
I'd like to know, if there is some possibility add fonts to Kindle books?

I know that there is format for Sony PRS 505, which allows that. The same should exist on Kindle as well, right?
I have heard something about Topaz format, which probably has embedded fonts in it, but I don't know, if "ordinary" person can convert some document to Topaz format.

Thank you in advance.
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Old 03-05-2009, 07:15 PM   #2
StanDaMan
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I've not heard of a way to do this on a Kindle. But if you could, that'd be pretty cool
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Old 03-05-2009, 09:52 PM   #3
kevindorsey
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Need to ask some programmers if this is possible, but it should be.
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Old 03-05-2009, 09:54 PM   #4
S.Canton
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I don't think this is currently possible, but it would definitely be an interesting feature.
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Old 03-05-2009, 10:02 PM   #5
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No one seems to have access to the software to create Topaz format books except maybe Amazon and some publishers. Not to mention the fact that some Topaz books look awful, tend to lock up the Kindle, and have slow page turns, plus are MUCH larger than regular files.
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Old 03-06-2009, 04:27 AM   #6
peggynek
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Quote:
Originally Posted by susan_cassidy View Post
No one seems to have access to the software to create Topaz format books except maybe Amazon and some publishers. Not to mention the fact that some Topaz books look awful, tend to lock up the Kindle, and have slow page turns, plus are MUCH larger than regular files.
Hi,
so your description confirms that Topaz is the right format. I do understand that files are much bigger (because of embedded fonts), page turn is much slower (it must somehow recalculate whole page with embedded font), but there is at least one advantage of Topaz format. If you read books in different languages, like Eastern Europe, Russian or asian texts, you cannot use included Kindle's font. Actually Eastern Europe languages are supported, but typeface is partially incorrect. In case, you would have embedded fonts, you can have perfect typefaces in any language in the world.
I can say that Kindle's font is not perfect, because as you probably noticed my origin is from Central Europe.
Probably different languages are exactly the reason that Amazon converts some books to Topaz format. I guess these books contain some letters, words or sentences in different language than English. Typically in French, Spanish or so. It would be very weird that purchased book would have some typo discrepancies or so.

It would be perfect to have such conversion tool from something to Topaz. Unfortunately you are probably right, there is no such tool (yet).

I am sorry for my English, it is not my native language.
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Old 03-08-2009, 05:54 AM   #7
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The only format that the Kindle supports with embedded fonts is TOPAZ, which is only available via Amazon (no 3rd party tools available). It is a terrible format in many ways, and in particular the embedded fonts are not anti-aliased and so are often very hard to read.

The ePub format (Sony PRS-505/700) supports embedded fonts (TOPAZ is Amazon's attempt at replacing ePub), and ePub will soon be available on many more EInk devices (but not on the Kindles).

The problem for MOBI (AZW) on the Kindle is the lack of support in its only font for most non-European languages. You can confirm this is a font issue (rather than a MOBI issue) by viewing your MOBI ebooks using Windows MobiPocket Reader. If this works (perhaps after selecting the right font), then they will probably also work on any MOBI device that supports user-installed fonts once you select an appropriate font. Your best bet is the Cybook Gen3.
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Old 03-08-2009, 01:34 PM   #8
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I don't know if this was a topaz book or not, because I promptly returned it, but I did once buy an amazon book that displayed very oddly on my K1. Parts of some of the letters were missing, as if the press hadn't been completely inked, or as if the type for that letter had been damaged. But a damaged letter (an e with the bottom missing, for instance) wasn't damaged everywhere it appeared--only in a particular occurrence of a particular word.

It was possible to change type sizes, and a word with a damaged letter had the same letter damaged the same way at different type sizes. It reminded me of a scan (image file) of a badly printed page.

My uneducated suspicion is that I was looking at a book where each word was an image of a scanned word, and changing type sizes meant simply switching to smaller or larger images of the same word.

If they did this with other, better printed, books, I can see that this might allow different fonts, but result in slower page turns because of all the images. I'd also expect the books to be much bigger. Does anybody know if topaz books are much bigger than normal azw books?
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Old 03-08-2009, 08:39 PM   #9
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TOPAZ ebooks are larger. My impression is that they actually contain bitmaps of each character at six fixed sizes embedded in the document. This might still be consistent with your scanned document assumption, if the character bitmaps are built directly from the scans and there were two bitmaps representing "e" (one seriously broken).
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Old 03-11-2009, 01:46 PM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wallcraft View Post
TOPAZ ebooks are larger. My impression is that they actually contain bitmaps of each character at six fixed sizes embedded in the document. This might still be consistent with your scanned document assumption, if the character bitmaps are built directly from the scans and there were two bitmaps representing "e" (one seriously broken).
That makes sense why Topaz eBooks looks like a fax at fine resolution.
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Old 03-11-2009, 02:04 PM   #11
Thomas Ryan
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Quote:
Originally Posted by peggynek View Post
Hi guys,
I'd like to know, if there is some possibility add fonts to Kindle books?

I know that there is format for Sony PRS 505, which allows that. The same should exist on Kindle as well, right?
I have heard something about Topaz format, which probably has embedded fonts in it, but I don't know, if "ordinary" person can convert some document to Topaz format.

Thank you in advance.
A lot of this was covered earlier in a thread about foreign language support.
Kindle (mostly) supports a well known standard. And, as noted, it's not very extensible.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...160#post374160
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