Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
Subsetting, as mentioned above, is a good route, though you still have to deal with licensing issues.
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True, but even free & amateur fonts that 'have problems' in certain areas may be acceptable for those few characters, so I think there is likely to be a good choice of licensable material.
Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
If it's only a dozen characters on 2 pages, why not just render them to png files and use those?
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I did consider that, but don't really like that approach on principle -- it's like translating a web page into GIFs (and losing the ability to search, reflow nicely at line ends, output to voice readers, etc.).
Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
Macrons are a different issue, as most fonts have a macron, but rely on overstriking to use it.
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Those types never looks quite as good as e.g. U+014D -- that method also increases the size, and makes searching awkward.
Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
For macrons it would be easier to embed something like SIL Gentium Basic which includes macroned vowels and has a fully open licence that allows epub embedding. It's still a hefty font at over 200k for each weight and style, but you could get away with not having to subset. |
Alternatively, I could use it and subset to strip out all the characters I don't need, decreasing the size... sounds tempting. I suppose I could also get around it by specifying e.g. Times New Roman on the basis that most systems will have it available, including macrons? (Currently I simply put 'serif', and maybe that's why Adobe Digital Editions fails. Mind you, it also fails to pick up on several things in the CSS so I'm not sure how reliable that will be.)