typography on the Nook (all types)

[BeccaPrice]

I have a writing project for school, in which I am discussing how to create ebooks from word files (I'll probably use Calibre and touch a bit on Sigil, although Sigil is awfully powerful for my audience).

I want to discuss typography: setting fonts, line spacing, things like that.

I know you can't do any of that on the Kindle. The Sony 350 and 650 let you install fonts, and I think you can set line spacing and some margin spacing. I know Calibre lets you set fonts and other things in the Sony. The new Sony TI comes with 6 installed fonts, or so I'm told.

What I don't know anything about are the Nooks. Do any of the Nooks allow you to play with fonts, line spacing, and margins? or are they all pre-set by B&N, and you can't change things without a hack?

Thanks for any help you can give me.

[marytg]

I use a Nook Color. It does support embedded fonts. I loaded a beta EPUB3 book, Moby-Dick. It uses the STIX font. The font folder is 956KB. Most of the EPUBs I have created are about that size or less so adding a fonts folder increases the EPUB file size but it doesn't seem to be a problem for "modern" devices.

Other formatting in the book is properly displayed on the Nook, horizontal lines, right justified, etc.

When I view the book on Kindle for PC, the STIX font is displayed but some other formatting is missing. If you open the book in Adobe Digital Editions, you see the difference.

It's time for Amazon to use the industry standard EPUB format for Kindles.

Sorry I can't find the site where I found the EPUB so you can see for yourself.

[BeccaPrice]

Right now I'm not so much interested in embedded fonts as I am fonts that are installed with the unit, or that you can install and set yourself in a document. But the information on embedded fonts is useful too, and I may play with that a bit for my project as well. Thanks!

[linux_author]

http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials...android-fonts/

[Doug Pardee]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

I have a writing project for school, in which I am discussing how to create ebooks from word files (I'll probably use Calibre and touch a bit on Sigil, although Sigil is awfully powerful for my audience).

I want to discuss typography: setting fonts, line spacing, things like that.

Since you're looking at this from the viewpoint of the publisher, not the reader:

#1: Don't embed a font unless absolutely necessary. If you embed a font, you take away the reader's ability to choose something else (on most e-reader models including NOOK). Embedded fonts are useful if you have some text in Greek, Russian, or whatever. If you embed a Latin-alphabet font, your readers will curse you.

#2: Don't set a font size in pixels. Set it in percent or ems. Setting it in pixels will take away the reader's ability to choose a different size (on most e-reader models including NOOK). If your readers can't change the text size, they will curse you and demand their money back.

#3: I'm going to assume that the same applies to text and background colors. Maybe the NOOK Color owners can tell us if they've ever gotten an e-book that they couldn't change the text and background colors on.

#4: Choose a line spacing that looks good. Most e-readers models don't give the reader any ability to vary it. In my personal opinion, line spacing should be slightly wider on an e-book than a printed book (more than 20%, in other words).

#5: Use left-justification, not full justification. Only a very few (minor brand) e-readers do hyphenation, so if you use full justification there will be huge gaps between the words on some lines, especially at larger font sizes. This is ugly as sin, and a "rag right" margin is pretty much the norm these days.

#6: Don't use soft hyphens (the shy element) in an attempt to make full justification work. I don't know of any e-reader that properly handles soft hyphens.

#7: Margins are a no-win situation. Some readers like minimal, preferably zero, margins to maximize the number of words on each screenful. Others find that difficult to deal with, especially if their unit has a tiny bit of the screen obscured by the bezel.

#8: On at least some NOOK models, you should leave about an em's worth of left margin for the symbol that indicates there's a note on the line, and another em's worth of either right margin or top margin for the symbol that indicates the page has been bookmarked. These margins should be set with CSS2's @page, not with CSS box margins; this distinction is mainly important for the top and bottom margins, which must be for the displayed page and not for the block of text.

#9: Books are generally typeset with indented paragraphs rather than blank lines between paragraphs. Traditionally, the first paragraph of a chapter or section isn't indented. In e-books it's common to see a bit of additional spacing between paragraphs in addition to the indent, but not a full line's worth by any means.

#10: Printed novels often use a single blank line to indicate a section-break. During typesetting, adjustments are made to ensure that none of these appear at the top or bottom of a page. You can't do this adjusting with e-books, and I recommend that some kind of visible section-break indicator be used. It's a lot classier to use a small graphic for this instead of some text like "* * *", but remember that graphics (as opposed to characters from a graphic scalable font) don't change size with font size.

Overall: be careful when converting from Word files. Word provides huge latitude for screwing up the formatting on individual paragraphs, so that most of the e-book will look fine but some paragraphs won't.

Oh, one other thing, but I don't know the details so you'll just have to watch out and see if it's a problem. The folks at Samhain manage to screw up their e-books when they convert them from Word, apparently by doing something that converts a chapter at a time. What they end up with is each chapter starting with a few KB of embedded CSS style information. This not only bloats the EPUB file, it totally confuses the page numbering computed by Adobe's EPUB rendering software, which is used in almost every EPUB e-reader including NOOK.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by Doug Pardee

...

#2: Don't set a font size in pixels. Set it in percent or ems. Setting it in pixels will take away the reader's ability to choose a different size (on most e-reader models including NOOK). If your readers can't change the text size, they will curse you and demand their money back.
...

Also, NEVER set the base body type to any size other than 1.0em. Otherwise, you disturb the user's choice of default size, something they have chosen based on their particular device and vision requirements. It is bad form to force the user to make custom device settings on a per book basis and even worse to do things that prevent them from making their own choice.

[ATimson]

Originally Posted by Doug Pardee

#5: Use left-justification, not full justification. Only a very few (minor brand) e-readers do hyphenation, so if you use full justification there will be huge gaps between the words on some lines, especially at larger font sizes. This is ugly as sin, and a "rag right" margin is pretty much the norm these days.

I wouldn't call the Nook "minor brand". And ragged right, even if it is the norm (which isn't backed up by the books in my library!) is even uglier than rivers caused by justification.