How to Put Custom Fonts on Your Kindle Paperwhite

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How to Put Custom Fonts on Your Kindle Paperwhite

This tutorial is for putting custom fonts on your Kindle Paperwhite while using Windows 7 so some of the directions might be slightly different for other operating systems. Please also note that your Kindle needs to be running firmware 5.3.0 or newer and does not need to be jailbroken to do this.

1.1 Connect your Kindle Paperwhite to your PC using the USB cable. Your Kindle should display a message with the heading “USB Drive Mode”

2.1 On your desktop create a text document by Right Clicking > New > Text Document
2.2 Name the document “USE_ALT_FONTS”
2.3 You will need to remove the file extension from the document. If you already know how to do this then skip to point 4.

3.1 To remove the file extension go to Start > Control Panel > Appearances and Personalisation > Folder Options > View > Uncheck “hide extensions for known file types” > Apply > Ok
3.2 The text document should now be titled “USE_ALT_FONTS.txt”
3.3 Remove “.txt” from the title
3.4 When prompted change the file name extension, click on Yes
3.5 To hide file extensions again, follow the above steps but recheck the “hide extensions for known file types” option

4.1 Go to My Computer > Kindle
4.2 Move the “USE_ALT_FONTS” document into this directory

5.1 While in the Kindle directory, create a folder by Right Clicking > New > Folder
5.2 Name the folder “fonts”
5.3 Copy the fonts that you want on your Kindle into the new “fonts” folder. They should be in OTF or TTF formats (it doesn’t matter which) and titled similar to the examples below:

Fontname-Bold
Fontname-BoldItalic
Fontname-Italic
Fontname-Regular

6.1 Unplug your Kindle
6.2 Click on the Menu icon (3 horizontal lines) > Settings > Click the Menu icon again > Restart Device
6.3 When your Kindle loads up again you should be able to find the new font(s) on the “Aa” menu. It is possible for other fonts that you haven’t put on your Kindle to appear as well. I’m not sure why this happens but it will not affect your Kindle.

The tutorial that I used for putting custom fonts onto the Paperwhite was written by Stino on Mobile Read. I thought that it might not be as suitable or clear for a general audience so I wrote an in-depth version. Stino’s tutorial can be viewed here.