Things around the kindle paperwhite.

Reading Japanese in traditional style, vertically from top to down, is possible. Calibre does not support this. With PDF it is possible to read Japanese vertically, but marking Kanji and looking them up in the dictionary does not work. The following procedure produces .mobi files, appropriate for reading and marking.

As input, UTF8 textfiles can be used. Or the .zip files obtained from aozora/青空, a library with free Japanese content, kind of Japanese “project gutenberg”. The following method provides these benefits:

1. get the Aozora pub software and extract it: https://www18.atwiki.jp/hmdev/pages/21.html (here AozoraEpub3-1.1.0b32.zip)
2. get the kindlegen software and extract it in the same directory: https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211 (here using kindlegen_linux_2.6_i386_v2_9.tar.gz onf Fedora19 64bit)
3. start aozora: “java -jar AozoraEpub3.jar” (here OpenJDK is used, java-1.7.0-openjdk)
4. select “.mobi” as output format
5. now select the input file and get the .mobi file generated
   1. obtain a data file from Aozora, for example https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000311/files/4167_ruby_14660.zip . For these, input type MS932 should be configured.
   2. or use a UTF8 textfile with your content as input

Getting UTF8 txt files displayed on the paperwhite and beeing able to use the japanese→japanese dictionary:

• Get the 「青Ｐ」(aop) software, its shareware. The previous website offering it disappeared..
• start it using “java -jar AOP3.jar” (openjdk from Fedora19 64bit works)
• configure input file, UTF8
• configure the 3 fonts, i.e. “/usr/share/fonts/sazanami/mincho/sazanami-mincho.ttf” from package sazanami-mincho-fonts. Those have to be embedded in the pdf file.
• as font sizes, configure 30, 7.5 and 10
• in tab テキスト configure custom resolution of the paperwhite: 758×1024
• then a PDF file can be generated
  • cons: generated PDF is not nice to read on the paperwhite
  • pros: but text can be marked and looked up in the dictionary

• OCRmyPDF https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF
• “OCRmyPDF -l deu german_input.pdf output.pdf” creates a textlayer in output.pdf for cut and pasting
• https://github.com/jrfonseca/jmdict-kindle – free japanese→english dictionary