Data on Kindle character sets and font

[susan_cassidy]

I was curious about the firmware update 1.2 for Kindle 1, and wanted to know how the Greek characters worked, since Kindle previously seemed to support only Latin-1 encoding. I was wondering about Latin-1 vs. UTF-8, etc.

I called Kindle Support (after a couple of non-helpful email interactions), and got 2nd level support, who offered to investigate for me. While waiting, it suddenly came to me that the Greek characters could probably be input to a document using HTML entities.

Here is his response:

"Yes, we have always supported UTF-8 encoded Mobipocket files. We also support the older Windows-1252 encoded files.
Although, Greek can be supported in either encoding using numeric character entities. For instance the Unicode value of pi is U+03C0. It can be encoded using the "π" character entity, which does not require UTF-8."

"the kindle has always supported UTF-8. The font sets are limited, however."

So, the character limitations are because of the font not having representations for those characters. Which is odd. I thought creating fonts wasn't that big a deal. Lots of fonts can represent Cyrillic, etc.

Anyway, the Greek characters now let them display more math, physics, etc.

Just thought people might be interested, here, since we have a lot of computer geeks, that like details.

[wallcraft]

See Unicode Glyphs test file for Kindle, on the situation with version 1.0.4 firmware. The test files may need updating, but they are a good start.

I think the issue with the font (Caecilia) and Greek was licensing, rather than the characters not being available from Linotype.