Issues with Ebook with Devanagari script (Mangal font)

[Pankaj Inamdar]

Hello friends,

I have tried creating an e-book having text in Devnagari script (Mangal font). I have bit of an issue here. While most of the text is displayed properly, only in some cases the letters are broken up and/ or partially shifted to next page. Please see attached PDF - the issues are circled in red. Surprisingly, this is not consistent, in the sense many a place similar letters are displayed properly.

The procedure that I followed to create an ebook is as under:

• Used Calibre to convert MS Word document in to an epub file
• In Sigil,
  [1]Right clicked Fonts, Add Existing Files and selected mangal and mangalb
  [2]Added the following lines at the begining of stylesheet.css file

@font-face {
font-family: "Mangal";
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
src: url(../Fonts/Mangal-Regular.ttf);
}
@font-face {
font-family: "Mangal";
font-weight: bold;
font-style: normal;
src: url(../Fonts/Mangal-Bold.ttf);
}
body { font-family: "Mangal", serif; }

I am not sure what

src: url(../Fonts/Mangal-Regular.ttf)

line means. Does it read the font files from the laptop or from the Internet? I am not sure if the path is right (I have picked the above code from the forum.

Request your help to solve the problem.

Thanks in advance

[HarryT]

Moved to the ePub forum.

[Abekonge]

I think your problem is not with the font (it seems to work) but with the way you have produced the html. Odd divisions inside words across lines or pages suggests that the html looks something like:

<p>The following word will break across lines/pages on some readers <span>W</span><span>o</span><span>r</span><span>d</span>.</p>

If this is the case, you should find another way of converting the Word document into html. You could try to copy paste the word document directly into sigils wysiwyg-editor - that can create other trouble, but it is a possibility.

((
The src-statement is the path of the font files inside the epub file - so this is the files you just added (mangal and mangalb), so it is important the the filenames in the src-statements are actually the same as the ones you've added.

But it seems to be correct since it is displaying on the reader. ))

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Pankaj Inamdar

I have tried creating an e-book having text in Devnagari script (Mangal font).

Mangal is a Microsoft Windows font. AFAIK, you can't legally embed it into an ePub that you plan to distribute on the Internet. You may want to use a free font, e.g. Annapurna SIL.

Originally Posted by Pankaj Inamdar

[...] Used Calibre to convert MS Word document in to an epub file.

Calibre usually does a great job converting .docx files to .epub files, but it's not perfect. To exclude Calibre as the source of your problems try the following:

• Export the Word document as a filtered .html document and add it to a new book in Sigil.
• Export your book with Toxaris's e-Book Tools Word add-in.
• Set the document language metadata to whatever Indic language the epub is in and also add a corresponding xml:lang attribute to the html tag of each .html file.

If none of this makes a difference post the html code of the lines with broken words.

[Pankaj Inamdar]

Thank you Abekonge and Doitsu,

@ Doitsu - Can you guide me little more on using Annapurna SIL? I mean, can I use that font while the original MS Word document is created in Mangal font? Can such a ebook be properly read on Play Books, Kindle etc. applications?

Thanks in advance,