Reading Chinese/Japanese on the Kindle, Part IV
Posted on December 9, 2009 at 10:17 pm by kyliu
Tags: chinese, ebooks, hardware, japanese, kindle2, unicode
Filed Under geek | 6 Comments |
This is a post about optimizing the fonts on the Kindle for displaying both English and Chinese/Japanese content.
You may want to start with prior entries in this ongoing series: part1, part2, part3.
Over time, as I’ve experimented with the Unicode Fonts Hack — the whole Kindle community really owes a debt of gratitude to Andrei Pushkin — I’ve come to settle on a set of fonts and formatting tricks that I think gives the best experience for reading both English and Chinese/Japanese content.
Fonts
If you go with the simple solution of replacing Serif_Regular.ttf with a Unicode font capable of displaying Chinese/Japanese, you’ll find that English content will look pretty ugly. Apostrophes, for example, may seem as though they are dragging an extra space behind them, and all the letters will lose their serifs.
This is because the Kindle only supports two fonts: a serif font (by default Caecilia) and a monospace font (by default Neue Helvetica). The serif font is used for most textual content, and if you replace Caecilia with a Chinese font like MS Yahei, it will generally not be optimized for display of English content.
The solution, of course, is to keep a serif font that is optimized for display of English content, and replace the monospace font with a Chinese font. Then, when you format Chinese books, format them in such a way that the Kindle will use the “monospace” font to display them.
For the English font, I suggest that you stick with Caecilia, which is very good. If you don’t own Caecilia or if you don’t like it, feel free to substitute any other font you like.
For the Chinese font, many Chinese readers like MS Yahei (微软雅黑), but it may be too dark for others. In any event, I suggest that you use a version of the font that is optimized for low-powered devices like PDAs rather than a version optimized for Windows PCs. This generally means that hinting information that lower-powered devices cannot take advantage of is stripped out so as to reduce the size of the font file. (E.g., Yahei and Yahei Bold. Note that this is not an endorsement of these fonts. You should make your own determination as to whether you think your use of these fonts would be in accordance with the laws applicable to you.)
Reducing the size of the Chinese font files is important since there seems to be an upper limit of 16MB on the size of the final .bin firmware update file. If you use a font that is too large, the firmware patch will exceed this size limit and the firmware update will fail.
You may wish to replace both the Mono_Regular.ttf and Mono_Bold.ttf files but leave the Mono_Italic.ttf and Mono_BoldItalic.ttf files alone (italics are rarely used in Chinese, but you are free to replace them too if you are a perfectionist).
Formatting
Once you’ve settled on the fonts and updated your firmware, you need to format your Chinese books so that the “monospace” font will be used. This is done simply by formatting your Chinese books as HTML, and wrapping the entire text in a pair of <CODE></CODE> tags. You can then use a tool like Calibre to convert the HTML files to .mobi files (which are natively supported by the Kindle).
The simplest Chinese HTML file ready for conversion for loading onto the Kindle would look something like this:
<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text-html; charset=utf-8"> </head> <body> <code> <p>“子曰：‘孝哉闵子骞，人不问于其父母昆弟之言。’”</p> <p>“闵子侍侧，訚訚如也；子路，行行如也；冉有、子贡，侃侃如也。子乐。”</p> ... </code> </body> </html>
You can get a lot fancier and create tables of contents and other layout and navigation niceties if you experiment a bit. (See this post by John August for some guidelines.)
If you follow these directions, you’ll end up with a Kindle that by default uses the serif font (optimized for English) to display most books, including books you purchase from Amazon. It will use the “monospace” font (the Chinese font) on Chinese books as long as you format them properly.
This is the best of both worlds.
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6 Responses to “Reading Chinese/Japanese on the Kindle, Part IV”
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Which kind of chinese fonts, simplified or traditional?
Depends on what you want. Many Chinese fonts these days contain both character sets.
Hi Kyliu,
Thanks for the outline. Do you have any idea if there is a step-by-step video of the process? I currently circumvent the issue by saving my Chinese files as PDFs. The only issue is that when doing so, one loses all control over the size of the text. Which might mean that one should probably enlarge the font size before saving to PDF format.
I’m unaware of a video that shows how the process of making your Kindle Unicode-compatible (漢化). However, there are many places with detailed instructions on doing so. For example, I think this blog entry is pretty good.
I am thinking to get a Kindle but does this support traditional chinese?
Not natively. You have to apply the Unicode Fonts Hack, and use an appropriate font, or use PDFs.