Fonts in Adobe Digital Editions

[odt2epub]

Hey,

does anyone know what fonts ADE supports out of the box?

Setting @font-family in CSS to specific properties like Arial or Verdana had no effect on my test output. It seems that only generic families sans and sans-serif are supported. Can anyone confirm that? It would be hugely dissapointing though...

If this is true, what do you do in this situation? Is embedding fonts the only solution?

Knowing a specific font family, I could at least specify serif or sans-serif as a fallback value. But the process is automated, and how can one tell by the font's name whether it's sans or serif?

[dmapr]

You may want to read https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36361 for an alternative to font embedding.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by odt2epub

It seems that only generic families sans and sans-serif are supported. Can anyone confirm that?

Yes. The default is serif and the only alternatives are sans-serif and monospace. These are all Adobe provided fonts, that don't have wide unicode coverage. As dmapr says, you can redefine the defaults on a PRS-505 by modifying the firmware - or just access user-provided fonts (placed on the device by the user) via each ebook's CSS.

Some fonts have serif and sans serif variants, which shows up in the font name. So far as I know, there is no way to otherwise tell if a font is serif or sans serif. This is really a continuum anyway, from the plainest sans serif to the fanciest serif.

[odt2epub]

Thanks.

I'm working with ODT as the source format, and XHTML as the intermediate one, so it seems I've found solution for my case, but it's not universal:
http://xml.openoffice.org/servlets/R...dev&msgNo=3357

[charleski]

Originally Posted by odt2epub

Setting @font-family in CSS to specific properties like Arial or Verdana had no effect on my test output. It seems that only generic families sans and sans-serif are supported. Can anyone confirm that? It would be hugely dissapointing though...

That's the only safe way of doing it. ADE is used on dedicated devices that generally only come with basic fonts. If you want to use a specific font for a certain book then embedding it is the best solution.

The input should really avoid making assumptions about fonts and stick to the 'sans' and 'serif' generic options if nothing is embedded (even for desktop machines, you can't assume that all variants of Linux will recognise Arial, for instance). If you're looking to code a way to to convert documents which haven't followed this rule, then it's probably enough just to set up a table to covert the 'web-safe' font names (Arial, Times, Verdana, etc) to their generic alternatives.