Kobo Touch - Fonts for Sanskrit and diacritical marks

[arspr]

Originally Posted by panmanthe2nd

You're right. I thought it had worked because the bit that I looked at was rendered properly but after looking at them more most of the diacritical marks are still just blank spaces.

I think it must be some kind of incompatibility. At least it's better than it was.

Last shots:

• Do you know that Kobos have two renderers? The common one for epubs and another one for Kobo's "enhanced" version of epubs (Kepubs). Try grabbing KoboTouch Extended Driver for Calibre which automatically converts your epubs into kepubs when sending them to your device. Maybe the kepub renderer (called ACCESS) could work even if the epub renderer (called RMSDK from Adobe) doesn't.
• Read the first two posts of this thread about the Calibre Editor. Here Kovid says that combining unicode characters should be avoided whenever possible. And more important that Calibre Editor normalizes them into single characters if possible. So you could try opening your books in the Editor, checking if your special characters have been collapsed into single ones and then performing any change, (add a space and remove it), in order to be able to save your book without combining characters, but already combined ones.

[tshering]

Originally Posted by panmanthe2nd

You're right. I thought it had worked because the bit that I looked at was rendered properly but after looking at them more most of the diacritical marks are still just blank spaces.

I think it must be some kind of incompatibility. At least it's better than it was.

It would be so much easier if we could see an example file. I know it is copyrighted. First possibility: Send the file as PM. Second possibility: Take one of the included html files, remove the whole English text, so that only transliterated Sanskrit verses and other Sanskrit quotations remain (those passages are not copyrighted), and upload it here.

[arspr]

Originally Posted by tshering

It would be so much easier if we could see an example file. I know it is copyrighted. First possibility: Send the file as PM. Second possibility: Take one of the included html files, remove the whole English text, so that only transliterated Sanskrit verses and other Sanskrit quotations remain (those passages are not copyrighted), and upload it here.

I also offer myself as second tester if you want. Freely PM me one book.

[tshering]

Last attempt: Do you see the Gandhari Unicode font in the font list? And do you select this font?

I renamed the fonts in this way:

Gandhari Unicode.ttf
Gandhari Unicode-Bold.ttf
Gandhari Unicode-Italic.ttf
Gandhari Unicode-BoldItalic.ttf

Diacritics show correctly in epub, kepub, pocket.

[panmanthe2nd]

I only just seen all your replays. I'll PM you both. Thank you! This is a great community. And I'll try Kepubs when I see my sister next.

Originally Posted by tshering

Last attempt: Do you see the Gandhari Unicode font in the font list? And do you select this font?

I renamed the fonts in this way:

Gandhari Unicode.ttf
Gandhari Unicode-Bold.ttf
Gandhari Unicode-Italic.ttf
Gandhari Unicode-BoldItalic.ttf

Diacritics show correctly in epub, kepub, pocket.

Yep, that's what I tried.

[tshering]

I converted the file with calibre to epub (default settings) and afterwards deleted all font-family entries in the css file. Now (that means after deleting the font-family entries) all diacritical marks are correctly displayed. I hope somebody can explain how to change the calibre settings accordingly (I am not very experienced with calibre). It looks like a further thing has to be addressed. The text of the whole book is underlined, at least in my calibre converted version.

[arspr]

Wow!!! Thousand of troubles in just one book.

First of all.
I think that there's a possibility of bug in the conversion engine. I think I should post a bug ticket in the Calibre bugtracker but I need your permission to PM Kovid the book or something like that. He will probably need it to check that possible bug.

As an example, the first paragraph after Preface has this structure in the Inspector (from the Book View):
html > body > div.calibre_574 > font

And it is converted into:
html > body.calibre > div.calibre5 > a > div.calibre13 > span.calibre18

WTH!?!?!?!? Why does an <a> tag appear?

Because that <a> tag has been introduced, (which means "hyperlink here"), the whole text is rendered underlined in the RMSDK renderer.


Then the reason why your characters are not rendered.
The original prc <font> tag has an internal "face = serif" attribute which actually kills my proposed font embedding (or loading in the ereader) process.

The default font I've selected is just the common "Times New Roman" which actually has all the needed symbols. And the "calibre" class used for <body> is correctly set to use "Times New Roman". So the first step is correctly done: now your whole book uses "Times New Roman" but where there are special settings about font use.

Because of the <font size ="4" face="serif"> tag in the prc, that default setting is overridden in several classes ("calibre18" and "calibre5") by a "use just a serif font" one. So you lose the direct link to the GOOD font. As the ereader is told to use just a common serif font, it picks any of the internal ones which lacks the needed characters.

And you cannot perform the second step about embedding all the explicitly referenced fonts because "serif" is not a font but a group of them.

I'm going to post this issue in Calibre bugtracker as a Feature Request for a possible enhancement.

The solution:

• Open your epub in the Edit Book tool of Calibre.
• Open the stylesheet.css file.
• You'll see that one of the first settings is just:
  

  ...
  .calibre {
      display: block;
      font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;
  ...

  Instead of "Times New Roman" you could have any other one. This is the default GOOD font you selected in the conversion process from prc to epub.
• Just look for any

      font-family: serif;

  line in that css file and replace it by:
  

      font-family: "Your GOOD embedded font name";

  (Be careful with the ending ";", do not forget it!!!)
• And if you want also replace the strange
  

      font-family: ScaTimes;

  by it too.
• (When looking for matches in the Calibre Editor, in the second drop down menu in the L&F toolbar, select "Current file" or "All Style files", because by default the searches are done in the "Text Files" which are the HTML contents of the book and, stylesheet.css is not one of them).

[arspr]

Bug ticket about the Feature Request for embedding "general" font settings.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1287954

[panmanthe2nd]

Wow! Thank you both!

Later this week I'll go and edit the stylesheet.css files of all the books.

Originally Posted by arspr

I think I should post a bug ticket in the Calibre bugtracker but I need your permission to PM Kovid the book or something like that. He will probably need it to check that possible bug.

You're welcome to do this.

[arspr]

Originally Posted by panmanthe2nd

Wow! Thank you both!

Later this week I'll go and edit the stylesheet.css files of all the books.

He, he,

It's even easier than that as Kovid has posted in the bugtracker.

When converting from prc to epub, in the Look and Feel section:

• Select the default GOOD font.
• Look for the Filter Style Information tab. Select fonts and you will be killing all that particular font settings so the default one won't be overriden.

[arspr]

Kovid has also solved something about the conversion. Your source prc is a mess. Re-convert it to epub and you'll avoid, at least, that additional <a> tags.

[panmanthe2nd]

Originally Posted by arspr

He, he,

It's even easier than that as Kovid has posted in the bugtracker.

When converting from prc to epub, in the Look and Feel section:

• Select the default GOOD font.
• Look for the Filter Style Information tab. Select fonts and you will be killing all that particular font settings so the default one won't be overriden.

THANK YOU!!!

I've done this, and have had a good look at the books, and they now all look perfect! Thank you for finding such an easy solution for me.

Next time you talk to Kovid you can thank them for me too.

[arspr]

Originally Posted by panmanthe2nd

THANK YOU!!!

I've done this, and have had a good look at the books, and they now all look perfect! Thank you for finding such an easy solution for me.

Next time you talk to Kovid you can thank them for me too.

You are welcome.

You can do it yourself in the bugtracker link I previously posted. By the way, he rejected my suggestion but hinted this feature of Calibre instead which I didn't know. Knowing every single feature Calibre has is plainly impossible...