Which Kobo Embedded Font Do You Use Most Often?

[justywusty]

This poll (https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=169027) is now a bit outdated since there are new/revised fonts, and I'm interested to see what people use most often now for reading!

You can choose more than 1 option. Personally, I seem to switch between Kobo Nickel and Avenir Next lately. What about you?

Feel free to explain the reason you like using a certain font!

[Ripplinger]

Caecilia and Malabar are my favorites, they're the most similar to LexiaDaMa which is what I prefer to use on my Sonys. However as soon as I come to a special character on the Glo, I get boxes with question marks inside of them, and then I need to switch to Georgia, it seems to have the most complete set of odd characters.

I even loaded LexiaDaMa onto my Kobo Glo since I never have that problem of boxes instead of special characters on my Sonys, but it does the same thing on the Glo as their other fonts and still displays the boxed question marks. I think I read elsewhere in this forum that Sony's firmware uses other fonts for those characters when it run into them.

Just another of those annoying things with Kobo's firmware, having to use another font over my preferred font just to be able to read.

[DNSB]

Deja Vu Serif and Charis SIL are my two current favourite fonts. They have the best diacritical support of any font with a reasonable size -- i.e. you use kilobytes not megabytes.

For the really off-beat stuff, I'm toggling between Microsoft Arial Unicode and Code2000. Neither is the best font for reading and both have some odd glitches but for displaying any unicode character, they are the best I've found. There is a Linux font with a claim to support even more Unicode characters but since the Latin alphabet looks as if it came from a 9 pin dot matrix printer, I've given it a pass.

Regards,
David

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Ripplinger

I even loaded LexiaDaMa onto my Kobo Glo since I never have that problem of boxes instead of special characters on my Sonys, but it does the same thing on the Glo as their other fonts and still displays the boxed question marks. I think I read elsewhere in this forum that Sony's firmware uses other fonts for those characters when it run into them.

What happens if you select LexiaDaMa as the font for a book? Have you checked that the font files meet the Kobo required naming conventions? And the usual gotcha -- you need to power cycle your ereader after installing a new font.

Regards,
David

[sapphiresilver]

I've been using a bold version of Caecilia since I find it easier to read than the standard one.

[justywusty]

Originally Posted by sapphiresilver

I've been using a bold version of Caecilia since I find it easier to read than the standard one.

can't you just change the advanced settings of the built-in Caecilia to change the weight?

[sapphiresilver]

Originally Posted by justywusty

can't you just change the advanced settings of the built-in Caecilia to change the weight?

I didn't realise I could do that. I selected Caecilia as my font, saw the "Advanced" button and tweaked the options. This is a lot easier than adding in my own font files.

[justywusty]

Originally Posted by sapphiresilver

I didn't realise I could do that. I selected Caecilia as my font, saw the "Advanced" button and tweaked the options. This is a lot easier than adding in my own font files.

on another note...why do people like Georgia so much??? I try to use it because I know people like it...but yucky.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by justywusty

on another note...why do people like Georgia so much???

Maybe this is why?

Spoiler:

[Ripplinger]

Originally Posted by DNSB

What happens if you select LexiaDaMa as the font for a book? Have you checked that the font files meet the Kobo required naming conventions? And the usual gotcha -- you need to power cycle your ereader after installing a new font.

Regards,
David

When I select the same LexiaDaMa fonts that are on my Sonys, on the Glo the special characters show up as boxes with question marks. Yes, I've named the 4 font styles correctly as Kobo needs. The font itself does work, I know the LexiaDaMa font is in use on the Glo, it is different enough from Caecilia and Malabar to see the difference. And yes, the reader has been restarted (fully powered off and back on) many times since installation of the font.

Using LexiaDaMa on my Sony displays all the special characters I run into.

A recent book I read with a lot of special characters was "The Stonehenge Legacy" by Sam Christer. I just gave up and stuck with Georgia font for that book.

Originally Posted by justywusty

on another note...why do people like Georgia so much??? I try to use it because I know people like it...but yucky.

It's definitely not my first choice, but as I said in my instance, it was the only font that displayed all the special characters instead of boxes with question marks. There were maybe 2-3 other stock fonts that displayed the characters, but Georgia was the best out of those options, the other fonts were truly awful.

Originally Posted by justywusty

on another note...why do people like Georgia so much??? I try to use it because I know people like it...but yucky.

What's wrong with Georgia? I use it because it's a serif font, it ain't cramped, and it seems to represent the most characters (at least for the books I read).

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by justywusty

on another note...why do people like Georgia so much??? I try to use it because I know people like it...but yucky.

I've been using it all along. I think I chose it because it was close to what I was used to with paper books. I have tried the others at various times and keep coming back.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Ripplinger

Using LexiaDaMa on my Sony displays all the special characters I run into.

A recent book I read with a lot of special characters was "The Stonehenge Legacy" by Sam Christer. I just gave up and stuck with Georgia font for that book.

Using my font tester epub, Lexia Dama lacks most of the diacriticals. No macrons, no breves, half the acute accents are missing, same for circumflex and tilde. Umlaut/diaresis does well, no dotted characters, only ring A and cedilla C, two carons (s and z). No yogh, no ezh, only 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 for fractions. Only 3 of the 9 ligatures. The test names from David Weber's books that I use show blanks so 'Sh g ', 'Toman k', 'Soth i', 'H r ka', 'Z r k ' and two names distinguished by one starting with a macron AE ligature, the other with a macron OE ligature both show as ' tesk'.

This strongly suggests that your Sony reader is substituting a character from another font.

I'd suggest trying Deja Vu Serif or Charis SIL if your reading material has a lot of diacritical marks, special characters, Cyrillic, etc. I've attached the test file if you want to see what various fonts can do. So far Code2000 and DejaVu are the only two that display every character.

Regards,
David

[Ripplinger]

I gave up on using LexiaDaMa also because you lose the advanced settings for Weight and Sharpness on added fonts. CharisSIL isn't a favorite font of mine either, I haven't tried Deja Vu Serif before, I might give it a try on the Sony though. But that's why I ended up using Georgia, only one word in "Inferno" turned up with the boxed in question mark (and I think it was "Atatürk Airport") and all the special characters in "The Stonehenge Legacy" displayed correctly, even all the Greek letters, so it's a pretty decent substitute when you need special characters.

But if Sony can manage to display the characters not in a font set by pulling it from another font in all instances, why can't Kobo manage to do it?

[rjcroy]

Originally Posted by justywusty

on another note...why do people like Georgia so much??? I try to use it because I know people like it...but yucky.

Georgia is an excellent serif font for current ereaders because it was specifically designed for the low resolution computer screens. Its tall x-height is a deliberate design choice to make it clearer at small sizes on digital screens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(typeface)