Creating epub books using Bangla fonts

[Nabodita]

Originally Posted by Jellby

What you need is an OS and reader that supports non-Latin scripts in general, and Bengali in particular.

As far as I can tell, the present iOs supports Bengali natively; my epub displays fine without font embedding. In fact, the default Bangla font installed on iPad 3 / iPhone 4 is "Bangla Sangam MN". Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be much hope at the present.


Unfortunately, reading is a dying habit. It is fortuitous that books have received a new lease on life with the advent of the ebook. Because of its increasing popularity publishers across world are releasing digital editions of paperbacks. Many authors are also choosing to self publish their work in digital form.

Bengali literature is vast and colourful but possibly due to the technological obstacles, no one is publishing ebooks in Bangla. What I want to do is start the ball rolling; hence this thread. Maybe in 5 years time if there is sufficient demand for Bangla books, support for Bangla will become the norm. Till then, I'm afraid, I have to rely on extensive testing, workarounds and compromises. /end rant!

Anyway, I'm still experimenting and looking at workarounds... I'll keep posting my queries and keep everyone updated on my progress. I hope this thread helps others who want to work with non-Latin writing systems!

Cheers
Nabodita

[mashru]

Some of us have been testing Indic ebooks on different devices. Most of the experiences reported here are in line with our experiences.

Here are a few suggestions:
1. Ipad: Do not use embedded fonts but let it use its native font. iOS uses ATT for font definition and rendering. Most .TTF fonts dont have correct ATT tables for complex characters.
2. Android. Aldilko and Bluefire need embedded fonts and they do a good job of displaying Indic characters. They work correctly under android OS versions > 4.
3. Kindle devices: Although indic script is not supported, basic unicode characters are supported. However, numerous complex characters as well as left vowel sign i render incorrectly. At the moment, Kindle devices are not usable. Kindle app on various OS have different set of issues. We have decided to not focus on Amazon app and devices except to test for basic compatibility.
4. Sigil display is mostly correct but you can not rely on it. You must test each book on different device. Calibre reader is good.
5. TOC: HTML TOC can be made to use either native (iOS) or embedded fonts (android). Other TOC for iOS renders complex characters incorrectly. Android doe snot render any characters.
6. Metadata: Both Ibookstore and indie stores such as smashwords use its own meta data specified when you uploaded the book. They do not use metadata embedded in the book for search. Hence you may use Indic script within epub and latin when uploading the book. Do not use indic script when uploading the book because no one will be able to search for the book!
7. Since Android needs embedded font and iOS does not want it, there are techniques for creating one epub file that can be used on both and can be used to create MOBI file.
8. If you are embedding fonts, you could embed non-unicode fonts (I hate it but many have done that because their original content was in non-unicode font).
9. We have most experience with Gujarati ebooks and have tried some devnagari scripts. I believe Bangla will have similar issues. You can see fully working epub books at ekatrafoundation.org site or at smashwords. They are free -- we are following Project Gutenberg's model as in running a non-profit organization.

I will be happy to discuss this further and share workarounds and templates that we have developed. We are too experimenting and learning as we create more books. You could write to me mashru2 [at] gmail [dot] com.

[Nabodita]

@mashru
I will be in touch as soon as I have finished the test file. You are a godsend! Thank you...

[Nabodita]

Originally Posted by mashru

2. Android. Aldilko and Bluefire need embedded fonts and they do a good job of displaying Indic characters. They work correctly under android OS versions > 4.

Using Aldiko v2.2.3 and Android v4.1.2 for testing a file. Inspite of having publisher formatting enabled, margin/padding and <br/> is being ignored. Font embedding and display is fine. See this post.

Any help appreciated!

Thanks
Nabodita