Font Embedding?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by teh603

What's wrong with just embedding the original font file? One of my favorites only weighs in around 140k. That isn't very big.

Sometimes the license won't allow the full font file to be embedded. Also, if you use a full font family, that does add even more size to the eBook.

I would love to easily be able to do font subsetting.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by teh603

What's wrong with just embedding the original font file? One of my favorites only weighs in around 140k. That isn't very big.

Font licensing issues. Going to a subset would make it a lot easier and cheaper to license fonts for inclusion in commercial ePubs.

[teh603]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Font licensing issues. Going to a subset would make it a lot easier and cheaper to license fonts for inclusion in commercial ePubs.

Then what happens if you need the Mah Jongg tiles? You'd need some kind of sanity check to make sure the glyphs you needed were included.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by teh603

Then what happens if you need the Mah Jongg tiles? You'd need some kind of sanity check to make sure the glyphs you needed were included.

That is indeed what we're discussing.

Professional PDF creation software checks what glyphs are used in the document, and produces a custom font files that includes only those glyphs.

It should be possible to do the same for ePubs.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

That is indeed what we're discussing.

Professional PDF creation software checks what glyphs are used in the document, and produces a custom font files that includes only those glyphs.

It should be possible to do the same for ePubs.

Does this produce an actual font file that we can embed? What is the process using Adobe Acrobat?

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Does this produce an actual font file that we can embed? What is the process using Adobe Acrobat?

Distiller seems to subset automatically. The font files are embedded in the PDF file. I think FontForge can extract the fonts and re-save them as usable (subsetted) fonts, but it's been a while since I looked into this.

So I suppose it would be possible, if you have Distiller, or some other PDF creation programme that sub-sets, to do the process manually if you really wanted to.

[JSWolf]

I'll have to give this a try and see how easy it is to do. I could in theory go from ePub > HTML > Word > PDF > Distiller > Fontforge and produce the subsetted fonts I want.

[pdurrant]

As a first step: make sure that my memory that FontForge can extract fonts from a PDF is correct!

[theducks]

Originally Posted by teh603

Then what happens if you need the Mah Jongg tiles? You'd need some kind of sanity check to make sure the glyphs you needed were included.

You need to obtain a license or find an free font to be on the up and up legally.
What you do for your own use, books should not be an issue. Sell or give them away, then you better dot the i's

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by teh603

What's wrong with just embedding the original font file? One of my favorites only weighs in around 140k. That isn't very big.

1.) a professional full utf-8 glyph range font can be several megs.

2.) in some cases the font's license would forbid complete inclusion, where including only the characters used; just as it is done when you include fonts in PDFs would be covered by the license.

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Does this produce an actual font file that we can embed?

That's the idea behind it, because afair fontforge takes python scripts.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

As a first step: make sure that my memory that FontForge can extract fonts from a PDF is correct!

I did find a Windows compiled version from July 2012. So that should do me just fine. It's a matter now of installing and testing if it will work with a PDF with fonts.

[teh603]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

2.) in some cases the font's license would forbid complete inclusion, where including only the characters used; just as it is done when you include fonts in PDFs would be covered by the license.

See, this is the part I'm having trouble with. I find it odd that a font license would allow you to decompile the font and then embed a subset of it, if you can't embed the whole thing. Course IANAL so that might have something to do with it.

[pdurrant]

http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/info/embedding.html

"Preview & Print: A font with an embedding permission of Preview & Print allows the font, either fully or as a subset, to be embedded in an electronic document solely for the purpose of viewing that document on screen and/or printing that document. While a font with a Preview & Print embedding permission (either through data in the font file or the font’s license agreement) may be embedded in an electronic document, the embedded font may not be used to further edit the document it is contained in or to edit or create other documents. Most fonts in the Adobe Type Library are set for Preview & Print embedding."

[Freeshadow]

A fully embedded font could be used after extraction by the books purchaser. A partly embedded one will most likely have too many "holes" to be of use for pretty everything than the book it was shipped within.
Given that some of the fonts are costly I understand that a font creator rather dislikes the idea of people getting potential access to a font worth X after having paid just a fraction of ot for an epub file.