Hack Your Kindle for Easy Font

Customization
JASON FITZPATRICK @jasonfitzpatric
UPDATED AUG 30, 2016, 7:56 PM EDT
5 MIN READ

NOTE: THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF OUR ARCHIVE AND IS

LIKELY OUT OF DATE.
(LINKS MAY NOT WORK, DOWNLOADS HAVE NOT BEEN RECENTLY TESTED FOR

SAFETY)

The font options included with the Kindle are certainly serviceable,
but why limit yourself? Today we’ll show you how to easily swap out
the font files on your Kindle for a completely customized reading
experience.

Why customize the font? Why not! It’s your ebook reader and if you
want the font to be crisper, thicker, look like it belongs on Star Trek, or
pack more words per line, there’s no need to let Amazon’s design
decisions stand in your way. Today we’re going to show you how you
can install new fonts on your Amazon Kindle with free tools and about
20 minutes of tinkering (most of which will be spent waiting for the
Kindle to reboot and rebuild the fonts).

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What You’ll Need

For this hack you’ll need the following things

A Jailbroken Kindle (not jailbroken yet? No problem, see our notes

below)

A free copy of the NiLuJe’s Fonts Hack

A Kindle/Micro USB Sync Cable

If your Kindle isn’t already jailbroken, don’t panic. It’s a free, simple,
and easy hack to execute. If you’ve already hacked your Kindle for
custom screensavers, you don’t need to worry about jailbreaking as
you did so to enable the screensavers.

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If you need to jailbreak, you can download the latest jailbreak here and
then follow the jailbreaking steps in the Kindle screensaver guide to
get up to speed.

Applying the Font Hack

In order to apply the font hack you first need to download the
appropriate pack for your device. Unlike the other Kindle hack packs
that include all the BIN files for every Kindle, the files for the font hack
are a little bit larger and the packages have been split.

If you are using a K2 (Kindle 2), K2I (Kindle 2 International), DX (Kindle

DX US), DXI (Kindle DX International)  or DXG (Kindle DX Graphite),
you need to download the K2 Pack here.

If you are using a K3G (Kindle 3 3G US) , K3W (Kindle 3 Wi-Fi)  or

K3GB (Kindle 3 3G UK), you need to download the K3 Pack here.

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In our case, we’re using the Kindle 3  3G (K3G) so we’re grabbing the
K3 Pack. Download the appropriate pack for your device, download it,
and extract it. Within the resulting folder you’ll see a BIN file that
corresponds to your Kindle device. In our case it’s the
update_fonts_5.0.N_k3g_install.bin

Plug your Kindle into your computer via the sync cable. Once
mounted, copy the appropriate BIN file over to the root directory of
your Kindle. Safely eject your Kindle.

Once you’ve copied the file and ejected the Kindle, it’s time to install
the update. While it only takes a few minutes, we strongly suggest
having a full battery or plugging your Kindle into a wall charger before
proceeding (we’ve had mixed results using the computer as a
charging source during updating, so we advise against it).

To install the update, navigate to the update menu by pressing Menu

Button –> Settings-> Menu Button –> Update Your Kindle. The Kindle
will confirm that you do indeed want to apply the update. Click OK.

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Your Kindle will go through the update process which can take
anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. When your Kindle restarts,
the hack will be applied. You can confirm the hack either by mounting
your Kindle and looking for the \linkfonts\ directly in the root or by just
turning the Kindle back on and checking to see if the main menu fonts
are different (don’t feel bad if you end up checking for the directory
anyway, the first time we applied the hack we found ourselves second
guessing if the fonts were really different).

Note: If you end up not liking the results you get from the Font Hack
and want to return the the Amazon defaults, just repeat the steps
above using the *uninstall.bin file.

Changing the Hacked Fonts

By default, the font changes aren’t super dramatic. The fonts included
in the font pack are intended to subtly improve the default Kindle
fonts. If you’re looking to mix it up with something more distinct, you
can do so by swapping out the fonts in the \linkfonts\fonts\ folder.
Before you rush to do that, however, we have some guidelines and
resources to share in order to make your font tinkering headache free.

First, there are some rules regarding which fonts you can swap out
and how you have to name them. When you look in the
\linkfonts\fonts\ folder you’ll see dozens of fonts. We strongly advise
against messing with any fonts except for the following:

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If you delete them or swap them out with incompatible files, you risk
making your Kindle unusable until you do some manual
editing/swapping/rebooting to undo your mistake.

The easiest way to edit the book fonts is to grab pre-made packs
compiled by MobileRead users. To that end, a really great resource is
this Font Files and Samples site put together by Charles Reace.
Charles has gathered up the most popular font packs, hosted them,
and included samples of each font taken right from the Kindle so you
can see exactly how they look before you go through the hassle of
installing them. Just extract them, overwrite the files in the \fonts\
folder, and then restart your Kindle.

Barring using the premade packs, you follow the advice of the Font
Hack creator NiLuje in regard to naming conventions and what each
font does:

Sans_Regular.ttf: Used in the Settings & Experimental page for

the explanation texts. Also for the dictionnary/note popups.

Sans_Bold.ttf: Used in the menus, in the top & bottom panel, and
as the collection title when browsing a collection, and the inline
text in the book & collection browsers (ie. the ‘delete this item’
stuff & co

Sans_Italic.ttf: May be used alongside Sans_Regular or

Sans_Bold somewhere ^^

Sans_BoldItalic.ttf: Used in the book list, for the collection names

Serif_*.ttf: Used in the reader, that’s the font family your books will
be rendered with.

Serif_Bold.ttf: Used in the book & collection browser for the book
title & author. (NOTE: For these purposes, Serif_Regular is used
instead on FW 3.x)

Mono_*.ttf: AFAICT, nowhere except in the browser, but I may be

mistaken. (Might be used in the reader when you’re feeding it a
raw txt file or some raw html files, depending on styling).

When replacing files, we recommend renaming the files with the

extension .old-tffso you can easily roll back your font changes in case
something goes wrong.

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That’s all there is to it! You can take the ultra easy route with the
premade packs or dig deeper and build your own custom font pack.

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JASON FITZPATRICK
Jason Fitzpatrick is the Editor in Chief of LifeSavvy,
How-To Geek's sister site focused life hacks, tips,
and tricks. He has over a decade of experience in
publishing and has authored thousands of articles
at Review Geek, How-To Geek, and Lifehacker. Jason served as
Lifehacker's Weekend Editor before he joined How-To Geek. READ FULL
BIO »

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