MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Special chararcters on the iPad or why does Apple not support Font-embedding?

jharker · 09-30-2010, 05:16 PM

Actually, it's perfectly possible to embed fonts in iBooks. I documented the basic technique in a blog post.

Essentially you can use any font, but it must be converted into SVG font format. Also, although it is possible to replace the entire text with the embedded font, it is extremely slow and carries other drawbacks. Still, for rendering individual characters, such as for math or isolated non-Latin words, this method works quite well.

However, for your situation all you really need is accented Latin characters, which I'm pretty sure the iPad is equipped to handle. I haven't done this before. But here's a guess: save your file using UTF-8 encoding. (It should be in UTF-8 anyway. Make sure your headers specify UTF-8 as well.) Then just use the actual character instead of the HTML-code.

Let us know how it goes!

09-30-2010, 05:16 PM	#4
jharker Developer Posts: 345 Karma: 3473 Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: Brooklyn, NY, USA Device: iRex iLiad v1, Blackberry Tour, Kindle DX, iPad.	Actually, it's perfectly possible to embed fonts in iBooks. I documented the basic technique in a blog post. Essentially you can use any font, but it must be converted into SVG font format. Also, although it is possible to replace the entire text with the embedded font, it is extremely slow and carries other drawbacks. Still, for rendering individual characters, such as for math or isolated non-Latin words, this method works quite well. However, for your situation all you really need is accented Latin characters, which I'm pretty sure the iPad is equipped to handle. I haven't done this before. But here's a guess: save your file using UTF-8 encoding. (It should be in UTF-8 anyway. Make sure your headers specify UTF-8 as well.) Then just use the actual character instead of the HTML-code. Let us know how it goes!