How to format ebooks?

[GERGE]

But noone really needs BoldItalic. I have seen it rarely used in novels.

[harriska2]

Can you run it through calibre and convert the epub to epub (it saves the original)? There are all sorts of settings in calibre. I like to go to Look and Feel and check Remove spacing between paragraphs and set the indent size to 1.4 em and line size to .5em. Then go to the filter style information -> check fonts.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Perhaps because Charis SIL can be embedded legally for free? I suspect aesthetics have very little to do with it.

Why embed a font at all? Any e-reader ever created has at least one internal one, afaik.

[cromag]

I like being able to change fonts and other aspects of formatting, but I love it when I don't have to.

[Jack Torrance]

Maybe its just what I read but I've never felt the need to change anything.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Why embed a font at all? Any e-reader ever created has at least one internal one, afaik.

Obviously I don't know for sure as I'm not a publisher , but at the time when I first saw Charis being embedded I, like many thousands of others, owned a Sony. The Sony built-in font (in fact its only font) at that time was appalling, especially its lack of glyphs for non-Western European languages. IIRC Charis helped to plug some of the gaps (e.g. East European, Cyrillic, ...) so I can see why it may have been appealing to them ... as well as being a no-cost solution.

Maybe they've never grown out of the habit. Actually, I quite like Charis, it certainly looks a lot nicer than that old Sony font. Eventually Sony changed their default to Amasis with much better glyph-coverage, but I'd moved onto Kobos by then.

Personally, as others have said, I would prefer it if publishers only embedded special fonts for things like headings if they must embed them at all. It's quite nice not to have all books look exactly the same. Unlike others I wish they didn't 'style-to-death' the front and back matter. I don't appreciate embedded fonts which only get used in their advertising pages.

[MikeB1972]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Why embed a font at all? Any e-reader ever created has at least one internal one, afaik.

Pat Cadigan's novel Fools, 1 person, 3 personalities, without different fonts for the different characters it gets really confusing

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Pat Cadigan's novel Fools, 1 person, 3 personalities, without different fonts for the different characters it gets really confusing

Hm, OK You got me there

[shalym]

Originally Posted by MikeB1972

Pat Cadigan's novel Fools, 1 person, 3 personalities, without different fonts for the different characters it gets really confusing

Why not use different attributes, rather than different fonts? Use plain old vanilla text for the main personality, italics for another, and bold for another. This would work much better for the people like me who never use the publisher settings and embedded fonts.

Shari

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Why embed a font at all? Any e-reader ever created has at least one internal one, afaik.

There's no problem with embedding fonts for titles, etc, but I do object to embedded body text fonts unless there's a specific reason for it (the use of unusual glyphs, for example). Leave me to choose my own!

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Why embed a font at all? Any e-reader ever created has at least one internal one, afaik.

Texts may contain special characters that can't be guaranteed to be included in all devices fonts. Anything outside of the Latin Extended character set runs a serious risk of not displaying on many devices.

That said; the epub version of The Grace of Kings wasn't to my liking (talking formatting here--the line-spacing especially). But I'm used to fixing that kind of stuff, so it didn't discourage me at all. Unless things are distracting for me, I just read them. I mostly buy new epubs from major publishers and rarely feel the need to correct them any more. They're "close enough" for me most times. This one was a rare exception for me these days.

Disappointing--sure. But even if I didn't know how to fix them, I think I'd have been able to acclimate to Grace of Kings' formatting pretty quickly.

I like what I like. But I'm not going to leave a potentially great book on the other side of some line drawn in the formatting sand over it. I read books where my formatting preferences weren't even taken into consideration for decades, after all.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

Interesting. On my Kindle Voyage, the line spacing is just fine, I can change to any of the available fonts (serif and non-serif) and over all a nice read. Could this be a Kobo problem?

It's started happening with Kindle titles too, but they're still fairly rare. They let you change the size, but nothing else.

[auspex]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

The biggest problems are with self-published books, though, tradpubs are usually pretty well done.

I'm not at all sure about that. I've read far too many really badly done ebooks from the tradpubs. I'm not talking about style, but basic formatting. No chapter breaks, characters using invalid code pages, and no bolding or italics where appropriate. All things that should be simple when your original text was in electronic form, anyway.

I do tend to think that the default format in an epub should be based on the defaults the publisher uses for "large print" books rather than for mass market editions: many people are using them for the same reason as they'd read LP books (e.g., it's common to use bold rather than italic font faces, as italics are often difficult for those with poorer eyesight).

But whatever you do, it should be possible to override it, or the publisher isn't getting the whole point of the medium.

I disagree, though, that this is a CSS problem rather than a reader problem. There has to be something in the CSS—and the hardware should let you change it. Apparently, for this particular book, Kindle does, kobo doesn't.

It makes little difference to me, as I tend to rewrite the CSS in books I own. But that's not the user friendly solution!