Tutorial on reducing font size on a per book basis

[howyoudoin]

Hi, I've been away from the forum for a long time, so pardon me if this is common knowledge already. I installed the 3.4 update on my kindle keyboard just a month ago (I know, I've been living under a rock), and recently found a way to do achieve something I've wanted to do ever since I first bought my kindle - to reduce the font size so that it more closely matched the appearance of a pulp fiction paperback.

My critereon for mimicking a pulp fiction paperback is 38 lines of text per page. The font has to be legible at that size, of course. I find that the default cecilia font is most optimised to that end. You can embed a different font of your choosing too if you like.

Scope: Kindles with version 3.4 onwards (i.e, kindle keyboard onwards). File has to be saved in AZW3 format. This is a per-book tweak and involves converting your existing books. I am not aware if there's a way to hack the kindle itself to this end.


Method: Use calibre to convert an existing book to AZW3 format, using the following settings:

<PLEASE SEE ATTACHED IMAGES>


There's a strange thing I found after converting my books this way. If you increase the font size from the font settings on the kindle to about the third smallest, it mimicks the default smallest size before the conversion, but the font itself seems to have improved!. I've always found the cecilia font to be too wide for my tastes, but now it seems to have assumed narrower proportions that please me more than before. It doesn't become as narrow as the condensed cecilia font setting, but just a tiny bit narrower than the default serif cecilia. So those of you who aren't interested in a smaller font, but do find the default serif cecilia to be too wide could try this tweak to see if it pleases you.