Baskerville Font not appearing on Kindle e-ink

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I can now confirm this issue with Libre Baskerville on several of the Kindle devices, including PPW and K3. PPW view (this is a screenshot from Previewer just because it's easier, but it's the same on the device) attached.

Dgatwood:

I don't know if this is a stem value issue. (I'm not yet at the point where I can adapt fonts. I'm still only halfway through Bringhurst.) Honestly, it's a bit odd that it looks fine on all other devices (Fire, HD, etc.) but goes utterly wonk on two of the e-ink KF8 devices. We'll investigate, but..I thought that the OP might want to know that our shop has just encountered this, also, just this day. We've confirmed this on real device testing, to include the Keyboardless (the K3 replacement sans Keyboard, whatever they are calling that now).

We are testing on this now; this is the first book in which we've encountered this issue for a Baskerville font. We have seen similar things with some other fonts, but this one, on this font, is new to us.

Hitch

That looks like an amazingly extreme version of what I've seen in fonts whose stem values were wrong. Usually, it results in random letters being too high or low by a couple of pixels, and slightly distorted.

Or it could be that the hinting is completely and utterly out to lunch, in which case, a conversion service that does autohinting might fix the problem by nuking the bad hinting.

Either way, glad you have a solution that works for you, and it is definitely worth contacting the font maintainers, because as you said, I'm sure you're not the only one running into this by any stretch of the imagination, and the problem really needs to be fixed globally.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

That looks like an amazingly extreme version of what I've seen in fonts whose stem values were wrong. Usually, it results in random letters being too high or low by a couple of pixels, and slightly distorted.

Or it could be that the hinting is completely and utterly out to lunch, in which case, a conversion service that does autohinting might fix the problem by nuking the bad hinting.

Either way, glad you have a solution that works for you, and it is definitely worth contacting the font maintainers, because as you said, I'm sure you're not the only one running into this by any stretch of the imagination, and the problem really needs to be fixed globally.

Interestingly, we've seen this, or things like it, in KP before, particularly (n.b.) with Adobe fonts. I'll reach out to the foundry/designers and let them know about it, I think I still have the screenshots and all that around here.

Hitch

[verydeepwater]

Originally Posted by Hitch

we used "everythingfonts.com"... We thought we'd see if there was a quickie, before we essentially redesigned and redid the font, and by Jove, to my everlasting surprise (okay, at least through dinner), it worked.

I wasn't quite sure what was mean by reconverting the font, so I used everythingsfonts.com to convert the .ttf files to open type, and then converted the .otf files back to .ttf. Is this what you meant by reconverting the font?

Anyway I found these new .ttf files worked both on kindlepreviewer and on an e-ink kindle 3, so it appears to have worked.

Thank you very much.

[verydeepwater]

Originally Posted by dgatwood

That looks like an amazingly extreme version of what I've seen in fonts whose stem values were wrong. Usually, it results in random letters being too high or low by a couple of pixels, and slightly distorted.

dgatwood provided me with a version of the font files, which he had edited and which work perfectly on the e-ink kindles.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by verydeepwater

I wasn't quite sure what was mean by reconverting the font, so I used everythingsfonts.com to convert the .ttf files to open type, and then converted the .otf files back to .ttf. Is this what you meant by reconverting the font?

Anyway I found these new .ttf files worked both on kindlepreviewer and on an e-ink kindle 3, so it appears to have worked.

Thank you very much.

Yes, basically, although a bit simpler; we dl'ed the otf versions and converted those to ttf at that site and it worked.

Hitch

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by verydeepwater

dgatwood provided me with a version of the font files, which he had edited and which work perfectly on the e-ink kindles.

Okay, then the problem was, in fact, the stem values. Either that or Fontographer autohinted the font when I re-exported it. Not sure which. Either way, it should be trivial for the font designers to fix the problem.

BTW, technically speaking, to properly comply with the font's license, you should probably rename it, since you're technically redistributing a modified version of an SIL font, even if the modifications are trivial.