Advanced layout and special fonts

[geirrosset]

First the premise.

We publish a book series called Biblioteca Nordica, which is an academic title (as are most of the other books and all the journals we publish).
It uses the Andron Corpus font, which is gaining popularity in academic publishing as it contains a lot of special glyphs and phonetic characters.
The editors have very strict rules governing layout and appearance.
It uses a lot of special characters contained in the Andron font.
We do all pre press work in Quark XPress 8.

I doubt very much that the editors would want the ebook version to allow font size changes as that would affect the layout. Zooming would be the way to go.

How should we go about making an ebook reader friendly file? I tried converting the finished pdf to epub through calibre. No luck. The only page that looks right is the first page containing 1 line of text, namely the title.

Are there any xtensions that export epub directly from quark?
What ebook readers support pdf files?

Any help would be much appreciated as we are new to all this.

Sincerely
Geir Rosset

[Manichean]

While I can't help you with your questions, I'd like to strongly advise not to go with PDF. Because the page layout is fixed, you'd have to at least redo the layout for every screen size there is to get any kind of easy readable file. My suggestion would be to just bite the bullet and produce a nice ePub. When well done, those can look really good.

[kiklop74]

Originally Posted by geirrosset

First the premise.

We publish a book series called Biblioteca Nordica, which is an academic title (as are most of the other books and all the journals we publish).
It uses the Andron Corpus font, which is gaining popularity in academic publishing as it contains a lot of special glyphs and phonetic characters.
The editors have very strict rules governing layout and appearance.
It uses a lot of special characters contained in the Andron font.
We do all pre press work in Quark XPress 8.

Font issue is easily resolved by using pdf, however in general pdf files are not that well supported/rendered on e-book readers.

You should try with epub. That way you will cover large portion of the market and epub supports font embedding.