PRS-950 PRS+ Font Help

[anamardoll]

Also, to compare and contrast, this PD book that JS Wolf provided and that I stripped of fonts via Calibre DOES work.

Maybe someone can help me understand why this one doesn't have the bolding problems but the Twain one (and everything else in my library) does. Thanks! (And sorry to be so much trouble!)

[JSWolf]

I have figured it out and it took me forever. I was dealing with the same issue tonight and I just kind of stubled on it and from what I've found, you'd never have figured it out.

Get a copy of Notepad++. This is needed to fix things.

Now, plug in your 950 to your computer.
Load every CSS from your 950 into Notepad++ and for each tab go to the encoding menu and select Encode in UTF-8 without BOM. Then save them all and try your eBooks again.

If that does not work for all but it does for some, then it could be the CSS inside the ePub that needs an encoding change. The CSS I was working with looked fine. It's just the encoding that wasn't fine and ADE didn't like it.

[sonyreaderfan]

Ok, this is really weird. I downloaded the noembedded Agatha Christie epub and the Mark Twain epub. For the Mark Twain epub, the font change to Charis took place. (I'm using Charis and Charis css too). But in the Agatha Christie book, the font was the original Sony default font. No font change took place. Can anyone tell me how to get the font change to take place with the Agatha Christie epub?

@anamardoll, to make things easy to trace, reset the style. Delete the file style.css in the directory READER/database/systems/PRSPlus/epub. Then do what JSWolf suggests regarding re-saving all the CSS files using Notepad++. After that, unplug the Reader and turn off the reader and turn it back on. This should make all the epubs use the default Sony font. Turn on the reader and open the Agatha Christie and Mark Twain epubs to make sure that's the case. Then select the Charis css in the PRS+ menu and open a THIRD book (any one) and then open the Mark Twain epub. Are you still getting bold Charis for the Mark Twain epub?

[sonyreaderfan]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

And the plot thickens...

SRF, here is the screen shot you asked for for "How To Tell A Story". As you can see, the text is very bold.

JSWolf, here are the screen shots for the Agatha Christie story, before and after stripping out the embedded font. The (embedded) picture shows the Fontin very nicely, but interestingly enough, the (device) picture shows the Charis..... NOT BOLDED.

I confess this is unexpected. This would seem to indicate that the culprit is NOT the PRS+ software but rather something in the individual book CSS files? But this is the FIRST book out of dozens I've tested that hasn't gone all bolded on me. I'm even more confused now than before!

I noticed something, the middle picture *(device).jpg is NOT using Charis. It looks like it's using the Sony default font.

What would really help is pictures with fonts on XL setting. The easiest way to tell the difference between two fonts is the y's. Looking that the y in the picture, the 'tail' looks too thin to be Charis.

[sonyreaderfan]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

Also, to compare and contrast, this PD book that JS Wolf provided and that I stripped of fonts via Calibre DOES work.

Maybe someone can help me understand why this one doesn't have the bolding problems but the Twain one (and everything else in my library) does. Thanks! (And sorry to be so much trouble!)

Could you double check that you are getting Charis font? (Choose XL or XXL size, check the tail of the y. Check against the font of the reader with the font previewer in Windows -- double-click on the Charis font in Windows. If Charis is not in Windows, copy it to the Windows font folder from the Reader.)

When I looked at the non-embed Agatha Christie file, I'm getting default Sony Reader font.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I have figured it out and it took me forever. I was dealing with the same issue tonight and I just kind of stubled on it and from what I've found, you'd never have figured it out.

Get a copy of Notepad++. This is needed to fix things.

Now, plug in your 950 to your computer.
Load every CSS from your 950 into Notepad++ and for each tab go to the encoding menu and select Encode in UTF-8 without BOM. Then save them all and try your eBooks again.

If that does not work for all but it does for some, then it could be the CSS inside the ePub that needs an encoding change. The CSS I was working with looked fine. It's just the encoding that wasn't fine and ADE didn't like it.

This worked right away.

You are a genius! You're right, I wouldn't have thought to mess with the encoding -- and funny enough, even though I copied all my CSS files off of each other, some of them had UTF-8 encoding and some had ANSI encoding. I wonder how that happened....

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH. Thank you!!!!!!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

This worked right away.

You are a genius! You're right, I wouldn't have thought to mess with the encoding -- and funny enough, even though I copied all my CSS files off of each other, some of them had UTF-8 encoding and some had ANSI encoding. I wonder how that happened....

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU SO VERY MUCH. Thank you!!!!!!

I spend (what seemed like) ages trying to figure out why I got bold text. I went as far as deleting all references to bold and still got bolded text. I also deleted all the CSS except for the font information and the body style. And still I got bolded text. Then I had another good look at a CSS that was working properly with Charis and I could not see any real difference until I took at look at the encoding. The encoding was different. Then I changed the encoding and the bold went away. It was only bold where it should be. If I put the encoding back to just UTF-8, it went back to bold and UTF-8 without BOM worked. Very strange bug in ADE. But at least we know what's going on now and can easily fix it.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I have figured it out and it took me forever. I was dealing with the same issue tonight and I just kind of stubled on it and from what I've found, you'd never have figured it out.

Get a copy of Notepad++. This is needed to fix things.

Now, plug in your 950 to your computer.
Load every CSS from your 950 into Notepad++ and for each tab go to the encoding menu and select Encode in UTF-8 without BOM. Then save them all and try your eBooks again.

If that does not work for all but it does for some, then it could be the CSS inside the ePub that needs an encoding change. The CSS I was working with looked fine. It's just the encoding that wasn't fine and ADE didn't like it.

This is all very odd. I've just checked all my PRS+ css files. All 20 of them have ANSI encoding, not UTF-8 without BOM. I've never had a problem with any of them on my PRS650 (or PRS505 for that matter).

Still, if your solution works for anamardoll, all well and good

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

This is all very odd. I've just checked all my PRS+ css files. All 20 of them have ANSI encoding, not UTF-8 without BOM. I've never had a problem with any of them on my PRS650 (or PRS505 for that matter).

Still, if your solution works for anamardoll, all well and good

It could be just UTF-8 is the problem. Not really sure. But I do think that you should set all your CSS to UTF-8 without BOM and you shouldn't have a problem.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

This is all very odd. I've just checked all my PRS+ css files. All 20 of them have ANSI encoding, not UTF-8 without BOM. I've never had a problem with any of them on my PRS650 (or PRS505 for that matter).

Still, if your solution works for anamardoll, all well and good

I can explain this, maybe?

When I went through Notepad++, I noticed that the ONE css of mine that had ANSI encoding worked fine -- that was Fontina in this case. Since EVERYTHING ELSE I had was broken and bolded, I thought that the Fontina one was a fluke of the font style. (Like, maybe the bold Fontina was identical to the regular Fontina.)

So it's probable, based on these data points, that ANSI encoding works and UTF-8 without BOM works, but UTF-8 be itself does not.

Thank you ALL for all your help in this.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

I can explain this, maybe?

When I went through Notepad++, I noticed that the ONE css of mine that had ANSI encoding worked fine -- that was Fontina in this case. Since EVERYTHING ELSE I had was broken and bolded, I thought that the Fontina one was a fluke of the font style. (Like, maybe the bold Fontina was identical to the regular Fontina.)

So it's probable, based on these data points, that ANSI encoding works and UTF-8 without BOM works, but UTF-8 be itself does not.

Thank you ALL for all your help in this.

Happy to help. If I did not have the same problem, there is no way anyone would have figured it out. It's just nothing that's obvious enough. The code looked fine. No errors. But for some reason, ADE has a bug when it comes to encoding I guess.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Happy to help. If I did not have the same problem, there is no way anyone would have figured it out. It's just nothing that's obvious enough. The code looked fine. No errors. But for some reason, ADE has a bug when it comes to encoding I guess.

It's lucky you were here then.

I'm sure I don't have any programs that would have told me the encoding of the CSS files, seeing as how I was writing them in MS Notepad.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

It's lucky you were here then.

I'm sure I don't have any programs that would have told me the encoding of the CSS files, seeing as how I was writing them in MS Notepad.

I've long dropped Notepad as it doesn't do much and it's a lousy ePub editor. Notepad++ is so much nicer. And I can do search/replace on all the loaded tabs. So that makes cleaning messy code that much easier. Without Notepad++, I'd never have found the encoding problem that was causing the fonts to be wonky.

[JSWolf]

I figured out part of the problem. And now that I know the problem, I can easily fix it.

Part of the problem is that the tools used to strip the DRM from ePub outputs the CSS in UTF-8 and that's the problem. The original CSS (in the book I had the problem with) is in ANSI yet after the DRM is removed, it's written out as UTF-8.