This is just a question and I figured this would be the best forum to ask in.

Do you guys know of any ebook reader devices that offer built-in support for italics and bolds? By this, I mean the following:

A) the bolds and italics are genuine font styles, not simulated like you see on the Kindles and Sony Readers.
B) they are on the device and do not require embedded fonts in epubs or pdfs.

Also, this is a slightly unrelated question, but will ePub support custom kerning and ligatures in the future?

Thanks!

The Bookeen devices (Gen3 and Opus) display genuine bold and italic fonts. If you wish, you can add your own fonts to the device (and use them with any book), and you need to add all the members of the "font family" - generally the regular font, bold, italic, and bold-italic.

The MOBI reader on the EZ Reader's (Hanlin V3 and V5) support italic and bold fonts.

All the mobile Adobe Digital Editions ports seem to use the standard Adobe provided fonts as their default, and these use fake italic and bold. However, it is in principle possible to replace the default fonts with ones that do include full italic and bold support. On the Opus and the EZ Reader's, this can only be done by editing the CSS of each ePub file individually, but there is now a hack for the Sony PRS-505 that allows the user to specify their own default fonts for all ePubs (Replace DEFAULT epub fonts! (PRS-505) (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=66102)). A similar capability has been requested from the vendors of the Hanlin and PocketBook devices. Note that some ePubs will have embedded fonts, which are not changeable by the user.

The Bookeen devices (Gen3 and Opus) display genuine bold and italic fonts. If you wish, you can add your own fonts to the device (and use them with any book), and you need to add all the members of the "font family" - generally the regular font, bold, italic, and bold-italic. For ePub, you also need to manually edit the CSS of each ebook, see Fonts directory for Calibre -> External CSS (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61589).

No; with the new Bookeen firmware you can do it for any ePub book - provided that the book doesn't "hard code" its fonts.

No; with the new Bookeen firmware you can do it for any ePub book - provided that the book doesn't "hard code" its fonts. That is good news. So Bookeen's ePub is again ahead of the pack, and looks like the best option today for those who want more control over fonts with mobile ADE.

The Boox does both italics and bold for .rtf and html, but not for pdfs.

The Boox does both italics and bold for .rtf and html, but not for pdfs.

Can you even overrule the included font in a PDF file?

Can you even overrule the included font in a PDF file?

I have tried just one pdf, and with it there were 5 fonts available ranging from small to largest.

There are two layouts, single page and scroll pages, with varying fonts available only in scroll pages mode. The device attempts to reformat the page to accommodate the larger fonts, and although the text is all there, the formatting isn't optimal. Line breaks are in haphazard places and wrapping will put half a word on the next line.