After trying about about a dozen different fonts, my favorite font by far is the Gentium Book Basic from SIL .org at:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/p...=Gentium_basic
It has just the right amount of serif to look very pleasing, has nice proportions in width and height, and has a slightly heavier stroke, without looking overly bold, very easy to read.
However, I have a problem with it rendering correctly. Things that are supposed to be italic show up as bold, and things that are supposed to be bold show up in normal font weight. This is in every epub (sideloaded, drm-free) that I tested, about a half dozen of them.
The thing is that with any other ttf that I've tried, and the built in ones, the italics and bold always render correctly, so I'm pretty sure it's not the epubs themselves, but something wonky about how the Gentium Book font is seen by the Kobo.
I have ensured that the fonts are named correctly, and as all of the other fonts I have tried, ie:
GenBkBas.ttf
GenBkBas-Bold.ttf
GenBkBas-BoldItalic.ttf
GenBkBas-Italic.ttf
I've also verified with Windows properties and a font management program (Typograf) that the fonts have their properties properly identified within the .ttf files and none of the bold/italics are misnamed.
In trouble shooting, I found that if I install only the regular and italic fonts, then italics show up correctly in the proper font-face (and *not* in the Kobo's attempt to make an italic out of a regular font) and all of the bold shows up as normal weight, as expected. But as soon as I add the -Bold version, then all of the italics are bold and bold stays normal weight.
Can someone else please test and give me some insight into whether there is something wrong with the Gentium Book fonts themselves, or if the Kobo has a glitch that needs to be addressed?
Fonts are attached for easier reference.
Thanks
The REAL Joe