@knc1 and NiLuJe
thank you for your kind words
@Barty
glad it worked for you
Now I've done a small table of Kindle's/NOOK's and some free serif fonts which may be helpful in "adapting" font's line-heights for use on the Kindle.
Let me explain the columns:
1 - Font: as found on device or as distributed (for private use the NOOK fonts can be extracted from software update files I think)
2 - EM Unit Size: in all cases 2048 but could be 1000, all other values are relative to the unit size
3 - x-Height: height of the x glyph (baseline to top)
4 - x/EMUS: ratio of x-height to unit size (0.45 means the x-glyph's height uses 45% of EM)
5 - caps-Height: height of (latin) caps glyphs (baseline to top)
6 - c/EMUS: ratio of caps-height to unit size (0.69 means the latin caps glyph's height uses 69% of EM)
7 - x/caps: ratio of x-height to caps-height (0.65 means x glyph has a height of 65% relative to caps-height)
8 - x-AdvanceWidth: Advance Width of x-glyph (incl side bearings)
9 - x/h: ratio of x-AW to x-height (1.20 means x glyph has an advance width of 120% realtive to x-height)
10 - Asc: hhea Ascender (height from baseline to top of font bounding box)
11 - Desc: hhea Descender (height from baseline downto bottom of font bounding box - always negative)
12 - LG: additional Line-Gap
13 - sum: Line-Height=Asc-Desc+LG
14 - LH/caps: ratio of Line-Height to caps-height (1.77 means Line-Height is 177% relative to caps-height)
(all values are for regular font, except Caecilia Medium which is used as Regular by Kindle)
I'm sure you will know what to do with all this information
but here some thoughts anyway
- Baskerville may have not been the best choice for the Kindle as it has a relative small x/h (Column 9) ratio; or: Baskerville is a wide font
- Caecilia Cond isn't a designed font, the Kindle software does the "condensing", I think Caecilia Cond could have a x/h ratio (Column 9) of around 1
- the NOOK fonts listed work for me "out of the box" for the Kindle except I like a little more Line-Height for Georgia and a little less for Ysobel; in case of Ysobel I use the hhea values of Caecialia
and have a good readable page
- the free fonts are all nice but need some "heavy" tuning to work on the Kindle I think; Charis has a very large line-height (the Compact version adresses this issue); Droid has very tight lines and Liberation (aka Chrome Tinos / same metrics as Times New Roman) is relatively small. For me the main problem with the free fonts is their stroke width being "too" fine for use on an ereader device. I do not need the fonts as "fat" as Caecilia, I am happy with the listed versions of Palatino, Ysobel and Georgia (as designed afaik with etext applications in mind). And this is me being 50+. So - as I said in my earlier post - give the original metric of the fonts a chance.