MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Apple symbol and other special characters in ePub

GrannyGrump · 09-18-2013, 10:51 PM

I think using a font might be better than images. Images don't always scale well, and can look jaggy or blurry. (Test this yourself by adding to an epub an illustration with text on it, style it in the html to size it in ems, so that it re-sizes along with font resizing, and see what happens as you move from very small to very large font sizes.)

A font you might look at is Symbola by George Douros, from http://www.alanwood.net/downloads/index.html
It is released under the Open Font License, so freely re-distributable. It has over 6,000 characters, including the trigrams. There is probably an apple in there somewhere as well.

It is a really big font, almost 2 mb, so you would be advised to subset it. (Another way to subset: load your completed epub into Calibre, convert to epub using the setting for "Subset Embedded Fonts" on the Look and Feel tab, then pull out that subsetted font and add it back into your original epub.)

EDITED TO ADD: On the other hand, for a commercial ebook, you have to be concerned about device support for embedded fonts. So sometimes images might be a safer way to go. Wouldn't it be lovely if every ebook problem had a clear-cut answer?

09-18-2013, 10:51 PM	#5
GrannyGrump Obsessively Dedicated... Posts: 3,200 Karma: 34977896 Join Date: May 2011 Location: JAPAN (US expatriate) Device: Sony PRS-T2, ADE on PC	I think using a font might be better than images. Images don't always scale well, and can look jaggy or blurry. (Test this yourself by adding to an epub an illustration with text on it, style it in the html to size it in ems, so that it re-sizes along with font resizing, and see what happens as you move from very small to very large font sizes.) A font you might look at is Symbola by George Douros, from http://www.alanwood.net/downloads/index.html It is released under the Open Font License, so freely re-distributable. It has over 6,000 characters, including the trigrams. There is probably an apple in there somewhere as well. It is a really big font, almost 2 mb, so you would be advised to subset it. (Another way to subset: load your completed epub into Calibre, convert to epub using the setting for "Subset Embedded Fonts" on the Look and Feel tab, then pull out that subsetted font and add it back into your original epub.) EDITED TO ADD: On the other hand, for a commercial ebook, you have to be concerned about device support for embedded fonts. So sometimes images might be a safer way to go. Wouldn't it be lovely if every ebook problem had a clear-cut answer? Last edited by GrannyGrump; 09-19-2013 at 02:00 AM.