Fun with Kindle Collection naming (or: ★☆☃)

[u-gee]

Since I got a new Oasis a couple of days ago (to compensate for my disappointment trying a Kobo Aura 1 ) I thought it was a good time as ever to re-sort all the books on my - now two - Kindle devices.

There's already some information in the forum on how this can be done collection wise (like here, here and here) and I'm not going to repeat that. Also what follows uses plain stock capabilities, so no JB or Collection Management plugin was involved.

After a first attempt to set up Collections via Amazon's "Manage your Content", some reading here on the forum and some minor frustration I suddenly thought it might be neat not to have collections with talking names - and that's what I wanted to share. Maybe somebody likes the idea too.

Why not having a collection named like this:

★★★★★

Or:

☆☆☆☆☆

?
(The color is just used to emphasize my point; there's no character subset yet which would change e-ink color I guess...)

It works.

Quite a few characters from the Unicode set (for instance the misc. symbols) are available and will be rendered fine on a Kindle. It's also quite easy to test via "Manage your Content" and live syncing to your device. If one character won't work or looks awkward (like too small to recognize what it actually means) just try another. The possibilities aren't endless but there are quite some.

To get predictable sorting (different from the actual character table sorting applied internally by the Kindle) you may have to add some "real" characters. I went with numbers in square brackets in front of the symbols because I feel this way it still looks nice.

BTW somehow I had problems renaming a collection via the Amazon web interface - sorting was always broken afterwards. I worked around this by deleting and adding a new collection which was OK since I did this all before filling the collections with books.

[knc1]

Did you try Klingon script?

[u-gee]

Originally Posted by knc1

Did you try Klingon script?

Nah, not really. Would have been too easy to read anyway.

[knc1]

Originally Posted by u-gee

Nah, not really. Would have been too easy to read anyway.

It might still be in one of the "Private use" segments of u-code.
And I don't know if any of the fonts on the Kindle support it.
(At one time (K5 era), at least one of them did.)

http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/klingon.html

[u-gee]

To be honest, I couldn't even try if Klingon would work 'cause I have no copy'n'paste font on my machine to get it into the Amazon Create Collection dialog.

It would be helpful to actually know what characters are available for the UI font of a Kindle. But I've no way to copy fonts off from one of my Kindles so I can't inspect 'em. Might be a nice wiki page though.

[knc1]

This might help, since it runs on Kindles:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=205634