Classic Newbie question on nook fonts

[aagstn]

I had been buying all my books in eReader format from Fictionwise and those worked fine with the three different fonts of the nook. However, I bought a couple this week in Adobe ePub DRM and I noticed that I was locked into a single font on the nook. Not only that, one of the books I checked out from the library forced me to use a very tiny font and trying to increase the size of it didn't seem to work.

Is this normal for ePub documents or a limitation of the nook?

[geertm]

Originally Posted by aagstn

I had been buying all my books in eReader format from Fictionwise and those worked fine with the three different fonts of the nook. However, I bought a couple this week in Adobe ePub DRM and I noticed that I was locked into a single font on the nook. Not only that, one of the books I checked out from the library forced me to use a very tiny font and trying to increase the size of it didn't seem to work.

Is this normal for ePub documents or a limitation of the nook?

I believe that with ePub files the fonts are defined in the book. But I always have had the choice of more that one font.
Are you sure that the library book was not a PDF file?

[wandalynn]

I've had the same issue with some library Overdrive EPUB books. No idea what caused it, but this was with files that were listed as EPUB, not PDF, on the library website. Luckily the font was one I didn't mind and I was always able to change the font size.

Other library EPUB files allowed me to change the font. And I've been able to change the font size in the PDF books I've dl'd.

Hopefully the problem you ran into is isolated. I've read about 5 or 6 epub library books and only 2 of them limited the font and none, including 2 pdf's, limited the font size.

[aagstn]

Originally Posted by geertm

I believe that with ePub files the fonts are defined in the book. But I always have had the choice of more that one font.
Are you sure that the library book was not a PDF file?

It is Street Gang by Michael Davis and it is in ePub format. It is the only library book I've run into this with so far.

The books I bought were two Rex Stout novels from Fictionwise in ePub and they definitely only allow one font.

It isn't the biggest deal in the world, I just didn't realize the books could control the font used.

[Doug Pardee]

An ePub book can force a font that is included within the ePub file if it wants to. This is useful for ePubs written in, say, Russian or Korean or Greek. The NOOK doesn't contain a variety of languages in its fonts.

Unfortunately, some English-language e-books abuse the feature and do the same. If the e-book doesn't have DRM you could put it into an ePub editor and fix that, but it's probably not worth the trouble and the e-book probably has DRM anyway.

This is covered in the NOOK manual (bottom of p. 111 in my copy of the 1.3 manual):

EPUB Format: Content is displayed using fonts embedded in the EPUB file if present. If fonts are not embedded, content is displayed in the text font you choose in the Reader.