Touch [non]deterministic font name detection ... and minor .txt issues

[msoltyspl]

I've been experimenting with custom fonts (as I need letters not covered by the ones included) and finally got it working - with help of a few older threads ... but the whole process was some weird add/remove/rename/delete/poweroff/on-in-different-combinations voodoo magic than anything consistent.

In the end I get the best results with font files named /precisely/ like the actual font, and appropriate suffix (-Bold, -Italic, -BoldItalic), and all case-sensitive.

So e.g. - for font "Palatino Linotype", I /had/ to use "Palatino Linotype.ttf" and properly suffixed weights. Anything like: palatino, palatinolinotype, shortcuts - gave mostly problems. Either some weight didn't work, or they were mismatched, or not present at all. And of course - remember about "mandatory" poweroff/on to redetect/load the changes properly (why not just provide a menu option for that ?).

Anyway - besides my guesswork - are there any +/- official rules regarding proper font names, that Kobo Touch (and we) should theoretically follow ?

And btw - on a related subject - why do the fonts included by default have so limited unicode coverage. Licensing/pricing issues ?


Another somewhat unusable feature is barebone .txt support (in my environment) that assumes whole world lives in iso-8859-1. Com on, there's linux underneath that has had very solid locale support, for many, many years already. Some option to specify default locale/per .txt file maybe ? Or at the very least if a file has BOM - automatic detection for those. Would be nice to see it in some future update ...

Sure I can just banally convert the file myself (calibre, or anything similar), but that kind of make .txt "support" shallow / pointless (apart from strict us/eu environments).



Apart from that, nice reader w/o amazon/b&n's monopoly/drm dreams

[vorchan]

Thank you so much for this post! I've been trying for ages to get my favourite fonts working, I had no idea about the filenames. I finally got Gentium Book Basic (which I love) with bold and italics working perfectly.

[msoltyspl]

Oh, glad it helped. I'll do more tests with names embedded in ttf files. Though tbh, this is really weird. ttf or otf - both of those include very precise information in their metadata about font family, styles, and many more. Why tie it in any way to the filenames ? ....

[Joe563]

Here is the explanation from Kobo about the font names.

[vorchan]

Originally Posted by vorchan

Thank you so much for this post! I've been trying for ages to get my favourite fonts working, I had no idea about the filenames. I finally got Gentium Book Basic (which I love) with bold and italics working perfectly.

The clarify, by "filenames" I wasn't referring to the suffixes (regular/bold/italic), I already knew that (not that it helped much). What I didn't know was that the files have to be named exactly like the font.

For instance the "Gentium Book Basic" files were named "GenBkBas.ttf" (with suffixes) when downloaded, but with these named the font did not work properly. However when I renamed them "Gentium Book Basic.ttf" (with suffixes) it works flawlessly.


Thanks again!

[msoltyspl]

One other thing I noticed:

When going after family name, Kobo software uses "preferred [sub]family name" fields in ttf files - which can led to subtle confusion. For example "DejaVu Serif Condensed Bold" has:

family name: DejaVu Serif Condensed
subfamily name: Bold

but (the one chosen, subfamily presumably ignored and taken from the file suffix):

preferred family name: DejaVu Serif
preferred subfamily name: Condensed Bold

If you want to have that font even listed along the non-condensed one, you'll have to fix it yourself (ttfedit is nice simple app for such purpose).



EDIT (clarification):

All ttf/otf fonts have mentioned "family name" and if appropriate - "preferred family name". The latter is only present if it differs from aforementioned "family name", and is used mainly for supporting more than 4 basic subfamilies (styles). So the former is like standard, compatible naming that any app should be able to support - while the latter is more modern version for software / sytems that can use it properly.

For example - mentioned above DejaVu fonts can be listed as:

single family:

DejaVu Serif with 8 styles - where extra 4 styles have additional "Condensed" prefix - or

two families:

DejaVu Serif with standard 4 styles
DejaVu Serif Condensed with standard 4 styles

Now the problem I suspect with Kobo Touch - is that it goes after "preferred" family name (if present) - or the API it uses does so, no idea if it allows to choose - though expectedly it should if it's worth a broken dime

Yet Kobo Touch - by its design choice - is unable to support that, as the styles are not only limited to standard four (regular, italic, bold, bold italic), but they are taken directly from filename's suffix instead of the font's metadata. So in context of the above example - DejaVu Serif Condensed will never be listed along DeajVu Serif without altering the metadata to not confuse Kobo.

[Anak]

I can install the fonts but font families with a separate smallcaps font don't work.
I have a Minion Pro font that also has a separate small caps font.
Is this supported by the KT? And how should it be named?
Minion Pro-Smallcaps, Minion Pro-SC, Minion Pro-S?

Currently KT does mimics small caps by using a scaled-down version of the font's large capital letters. This is undesirable, as the weight of the font is also scaled down, giving the small caps a much thinner appearance.
A "true" smallcaps font doesn't do that.