Hi,
What is the best way to use multiple fonts ? (in multilingual ebooks, for example)
First of all, I noticed two different behaviours depending on the filename of the ebook (please do correct me if I am wrong):
- .epub (regular epub) : if the stylesheet doesn't specify a font, one and only one font is applied to all the book. An empty box is displayed if a character doesn't exist in the font.
- Example: if you choose a chinese font, the chinese will be correctly displayed but some pronunciation in latin characters (pinyin) might be broken because of the lack of accents in this font. Even if there are plenty of fonts with accent installed by default on the device.
- .kepub.epub (access epub) : if no stylesheet is specified in the book, the engine can use different fonts to match all the characters (chinese, arabic, hebrew, tibetan...) in the book (the loading of fonts can take some time, though)
- Example: in a bilingual epub showing sanskrit, and french, as long as there is a sanskrit font installed in the device, two different fonts will be applied to the text, depending on the language of the word.
Are there other options than those?
- include specific fonts inside the epub, and using the stylesheet to display them
- Perfect control: the book will be correctly displayed whether the user has installed the fonts or not, and whether the book is an epub or a kepub.epub.
- Heavier book (especially for large CJK (chinese, japanese, korean) fonts
- No liberty for the user (unless the user re-edits the stylesheet)
- letting the user choose them in the device
- very difficult with regular epub (only one font for the whole book)
- requires that the different characters sets of the book have corresponding fonts installed on the device (an advice at the beginning of the book would be nice)
- having a stylesheet with generic font families
- Would eventually work on regular epub and kepub.epubs
- no guaranty on the result
- Unfortunately, the font-family doesn't apply to character sets (who knows how to use the "unicode-range" css property? And how is it understood by our engines?)
I consider that there is no definite solution, and that everyone has to deal with the three dimensions of the problem (size - liberty - simplicity) depending on the expected audience of their production.
I would be happy to hear about your ideas, tips, tricks and the different solutions you use (or would be using).
On a more "activist" plan, any suggestions about how we could improve and help such publication would also be nice. At this stage I miss:
- a list of the character sets covered by the default kobo fonts
- a bundle of a minimum list of fonts to cover the missing character sets ("a mobileread recommendation") to harmonize multilingual edition
François