Make Sony Reader PRS 600 show cyrillic

Hello all. Today, I got my new Reader. It's very, very cute and lovely and I'm very happy with it. It reads fine (even if the contrast is less than on the new PRS 650 or Kinddle - but then, they are more expensive or unavailable in Bulgaria). So PRS 600 it is.
For now, it behaves very nicely and I even made few drawings just for the fun of drawing on the screen. I also downloaded free books from http://www.epubbooks.com/ and some Bulgarian sites and putting them on the Reader is piece of cake. I also tried reading scientific pdf - the text is really somewhat small in the original size and looks weird when you zoom in, but the figures look cool and hey, that's the first time I actually enjoy reading that article! :)

The only problem I encountered so far is that I couldn't read Cyrillic fonts, which US people obviously consider unessential for their customers. However, it's quite important for me! So, after an hour and so unhappy searching the net, I found this extremely simple tutorial how to do the trick. In short - you can either use a patch for the firmware  (which however will eliminate the warranty) or you can convert your books to embed their own fonts and then, you can see the Cyrillic. I chose the second option and then I spent some quality time looking for an EASY way to embed fonts into EPUB file. Needless to say that this was my first time hearing about epub files :)

Anyway, he's the best solution I found so far:

Embedding your fonts into ePub automatically using Calibre

1. Download Calibre for your OS (Win/Lin/Mac) and install it;

2. Download the attached plugin file (originally from Paul Tomashevskyi, GPL, see MobileRead thread)

3. Install it via Calibre's Preferences> Plugins: provide the path to the downloaded plugin and click "Add" button;

4. Check that it has appeared in the list of plugins at File type plugins branch under EPUB Font embedding plugin name and it's enabled (which is a default behavior on plugin addition);

5. Now open Preferences> Conversion> Look & Feel and add the following CSS declaration into Extra CSS area:

Code:

body {

font-family: "Liberation", sans-serif;

}

This will tell Calibre that we want to use "Liberation" font family we're going to embed into converted ePub content and it will add the font-family into own styles when it parses your ePub contents;

7. Add your content - which lacks embedded fonts and CSS declarations OR its embedded fonts aren't capable of providing glyphs for our UTF codepoints - into Calibre's library;

8. Select (or highlight) the content in the library list;

9. Proceed with the next toolbar icon and its option: Convert E-Books> Convert individually;

10. Set input format and output format to EPUB;

11. Check Look & Feel and that Extra CSS area contains what's been specified in (5) (On Windows it was okay while under Ubuntu it took a couple of restarts for the defaults we set in (5) to pop up on actual conversions in the app: dunno, guess I did something dead wrong);

12. Click OK.

Your ebook gets converted into EPUB and we end up having a set of Calibre's own UTF aware fonts (Liberation, serif set) embedded into it. source

It looks long, but actually it's very very quick. It took me like 15 minutes with the installation of Calibre and the plugin! This cool program even has a plugin for Sony Readers! And it works awesomely in Linux and it recognized and mounted the Reader without any help from my side. I just did the steps and I had my first Cyrillic book on my Reader. The only thing that didn't get converted, who knows why, are the titles of the chapters. But the text is fine and perfectly readable.

If anyone else encounters this problem - this is the way! Also, you can use other fonts (see the source), but I didn't bother. This one works fine for me and that's the most important.
Cheers!

Edit:
I had one more problem with some titles, who won't show properly. It turned out that they had the idiotic option "font-variant:small-caps" in their original css. Because that option is not included in the Liberation font, the font won't show those letters in Cyrillic (but in ??? instead).
Thanks to a Belorussian friend Vad, a solution is available.

One has to open the epub file manually (in Calibre, select the book and press T) and then to edit the css, by deleting all the "font-variant:small-caps" in it. Save it, close the folder, rebuild the epub and that's it.
You have titles in Cyrillic too.