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Old 12-28-2009, 06:24 PM   #1
lol
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Unicode Fonts on Global Kindle

Hi everyone,

I live in Canada, and I have my eye on the Kindle Global.

Doing some research, I found out that the Kindle Global does not support unicode fonts. I am mostly interested in the Kindle Global to read academic works in my e-library. Many of these documents use sanskrit unicode characters (I believe latin extended), and I am told these characters will be displayed as little boxes instead of the proper character.

I have read about a patch that allows for the installation of unicode fonts on the Kindle Global, but I have also read that it is very possible to brick the machine if you don't know what you're doing (and I don't). I'm also not so keen on having to uninstall/reinstall the patch after a Kindle update.

Would anyone have any suggestions on how I could edit files or safely update the Kindle so that unicode characters would display properly?

Does anyone know if a Kindle update is coming out that would allow the unit to display unicode fonts?

Lastly, would anyone recommend another reader available in Canada that may be a better choice?

Thanks a lot,
lol
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Old 12-28-2009, 08:19 PM   #2
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Check my sig for instructions on how to install the font hacks for all Kindles. If you need a more specific font, you may want to contact Blog Kindle for help (he's a member here but there is also a link to his bog on the font hack page).
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Old 12-28-2009, 08:42 PM   #3
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There's really no such thing as a 'unicode font'. I don't think any one font covers all possible characters in all languages, as unicode encoding covers many character sets. For example sanskrit characters are wildly different from Chinese characters, or hieroglyphics. They would have to install many fonts to cover all possible languages, and they are probably waiting to see what the demand really is before putting any work into determining how to represent character encodings in a bunch of different fonts (including languages that read right to left, instead of left to right, etc.).
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Old 12-28-2009, 09:03 PM   #4
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Creating a pdf with embedded fonts should do the trick for any language.
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Old 12-28-2009, 10:27 PM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by susan_cassidy View Post
There's really no such thing as a 'unicode font'. I don't think any one font covers all possible characters in all languages, as unicode encoding covers many character sets. For example sanskrit characters are wildly different from Chinese characters, or hieroglyphics. They would have to install many fonts to cover all possible languages, and they are probably waiting to see what the demand really is before putting any work into determining how to represent character encodings in a bunch of different fonts (including languages that read right to left, instead of left to right, etc.).
Thanks for this. I'm not really versed enough in the details or the lingo to have explained my question well. I can tell you that I'm looking for these characters: ā ū ī ḍ ḷ ñ ṇ ṅ ṁ ṭ (I hope you can see them!) + in CAPS, and I think they are part of the Latin extended family. ā ū ī and ñ are rendered correctly, but not the others

Do you think an update coming from Amazon would work with the Kindle Global that's out now or would you recommend waiting/looking for different hardware?

... as an aside, I wonder how difficult it would be to let people sync up with their PCs to install fonts of their choice.

Thanks for everyone's input.

Last edited by lol; 12-28-2009 at 10:50 PM. Reason: clarification
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