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

[tekkasit]

@meem I think it is Java 1.4 font properties file format, the documentation is at http://download.oracle.com/javase/1..../fontprop.html

[richardb]

Originally Posted by richardb

Here is the same font added with the missing » and «. Now it should be complete.

Sorry, I discovered that the big letters ÜÖÄ were not implemented. So I started searching and found a font, which has it all:

WenQuanYi Micro Hei, a Droid Sans Fallback-Alternative !

http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi

"I. About this font

WenQuanYi Micro Hei font family is a Sans-Serif style (also known as Hei,
Gothic or Dotum among the Chinese/Japanese/Korean users) high quality
CJK outline font. It was derived from "Droid Sans Fallback", "Droid
Sans" and "Droid Sans Mono" released by Google Corp. This font package
contains two faces, "Micro Hei" and "Micro Hei Mono", in form of a
True-Type Collection (ttc) file. All the unified CJK Han glyphs, i.e.
GBK Hanzi, in the range of U+4E00-U+9FC3 defined in Unicode Standard 5.1
are covered, with additional support to many other international
languages such as Latin, Extended Latin, Hanguls and Kanas. The font
file is extremely compact (~5M) compared with most known CJK fonts.
As a result, it can be used for hand-held devices or embedded systems, or
used on PC with a significantly small memory footprint. Because both
font faces carry hinting and kerning instructions for Latin glyphs,
they are the excellent choices for desktop fonts.


II. Development History

The original Droid Sans Fallback font contain 16,000 Unified Han glyphs,
and was officially released by Google under Apache2 license on Dec. 9,
2008 [2]. With a Javascript-based web interface, Fontopia(TM) [1], developed
by mozbug and Qianqian Fang, the WenQuanYi contributors had completed
over 10,000 new glyphs by combining the spline contours from the existing
Droid Han glyphs. By the end of 2008, project phase-1 had almost
completed, and phase-2 for CJK Extension A (U+3400-U+4DB5) was brought
online on Dec. 29, 2009. A review panel was formed to reinforce the
quality of all submitted glyphs [3]. In Jan. 2009, the reviewers
had redone over 2000 Hanzi and completed all the missing characters.
The nightly-build font has become online since Jan. 16. As of Feb. 2009, there
has been over 5500 CJK Extension A Han glyphs completed, which led this
font toward a complete GB18030 coverage.

In this font, we incorporated the high quality Latin glyphs from "Droid Sans"
and "Droid Sans Mono", which contain not only a better coverage but also
the additional hinting and kerning information. The EM of MicroHei
and MicroHeiMono fonts were unified to 2048 to retain all the advanced
typesetting features."

I extracted the normal ttf-font from the ttc (TrueType Font collection).
Rename it then to Serif_regular.ttf and there you go.

[bbildman]

May be of interest to font hackers, I went through the jailbreak and font hack successfully. Normally I have my "Home" page sorted by "Collection" and as I read certain books, the book I have read most recently always goes to the top of the list, under whatever collections I have.

I found, however, that with the hack and jailbreak installed, that does NOT occur. I uninstalled both the font hack and the jailbreak and voila, it was as before...books read recently go to the top again.

[NiLuJe]

They still do with me .

But this may be because the clock on your Kindle skewed a bit somehow. Doing a sync & check with whispernet on to make ntpd happy usually solves this.

[meem]

Originally Posted by tekkasit

@meem I think it is Java 1.4 font properties file format, the documentation is at http://download.oracle.com/javase/1..../fontprop.html

This section should be helpful:

Component Font Character Encodings:

Component font character encoding properties indicate which character encoding AWT should use when accessing the corresponding component fonts. These properties are only needed if the component fonts cannot be accessed using Unicode - newer TrueType fonts can usually be accessed using Unicode and don't need this property.

The keys have the form:

fontcharset.LogicalFontName.ComponentIndex

The values are fully qualified class names of character converters. In this release, character converters are accessed using the old sun.io interfaces, so only the character encodings provided by the Java 2 Runtime Environment can be used. The class names for the publicly supported character encodings are of the form:

sun.io.CharToByteCanonicalName

In a future release, character converters will be accessed through the new java.nio.charset API, which will enable the use of third-party character converters.

And this is Supported Encodings.
But I ask about syntax and efficiency.
As you can see above, the value in font.properties file is "ISO8859_1" not "ISO-8859-1" as what in the reference.
Any way, I am using now:

PHP Code:

fontcharset.serif.0=sun.io.CharToByteUTF-8 


and my custom font is worked perfectly, maybe it's not needed, so I'll try to restore the old value to see the effect.

[NiLuJe]

@meem: Check the docs/packages provided. You pretty much don't have to do anything except extract an archive and rename a file or reboot your Kindle.

If you're trying custom fonts not already packaged, then it's easier and less error-prone to just rename them following the usual scheme (because there's a bunch of safety checks in the hack preventing you from running with missing fonts, which would potentially be bad). But if you prefer tinkering with the fonts config, you can do it too. I'm pretty sure we don't have to touch the encoding options, and at least I never heard anyone having to do it to fix something. I'm not even sure anything user-visible in the Kindle fwk rely on that. (Maybe the browser?)

[Basekid]

Anyone else having the problem that Calibre does not seem to pickup that a Kindle is connected?

I have a Kindle 2i with jailbreak + fonts + ss installed (thanks for those btw!) but Calibre refuses to recognize that my kindle is attached to my pc

[NiLuJe]

@Basekid: Does your OS see it? If not, I blame the OS/USB Plug/USB Cord. .

[Basekid]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

@Basekid: Does your OS see it? If not, I blame the OS/USB Plug/USB Cord. .

Yeah Windows sees is fine. I can happily drag and drop files via explorer.

[bbildman]

I've finally got a new font installed, and just would like to find out that IF there are new firmware updates coming from Amazon, will the hacked Kindle K2i allow the download and install of it, or will I have to go back to default firmware...and then reinstall the hack(s)

Thanks

[NiLuJe]

@Basekid: Unless you're using something that somehow messes up the Kindle USB MS DeviceID, the hacks here shouldn't prevent Calibre form seeing your Kindle... (And for the record, it works here, both on *nix & Win7). There's a device detection debug option somewhere in Calibre if I remember correctly, take a look at that .

@bbildman: It will both download & install successfully, yes. In the specific case of the fonts hack, if the K3 features are backported, the hacks will probably need an update to *function* correctly, but it won't prevent updates from installing.

[Basekid]

Hm ok. It seems to be working 1 out of every 8 times i connect or so. I'll try that debug option

[test011]

Would that be too early to talk about Kindle3's ver 3.0 firmware compatible hacks?

[NiLuJe]

As soon as my K3 gets here, we'll see about that (Which should be sometime early next week, it *just* switched to "Shipping Soon" ).

[test011]

Mine is also 'shipping soon' now.

Some of people in my local forum got K3 already. The new language fonts are in there alright, including Asian charset support, but it's not a pretty sight. It looks like some ancient fonts from EGA era. I guess demands for international font hack will certainly persist, maybe even more.