[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Susan Archie

Hi Hitch, I don't know what that is, "obscured fonts". Do you mean embedded? I am using Times (System font) and Arial.

INDD and Adobe frequently use "encrypted" fonts in their programs. If your font is encrypted, you will have trouble in ePUB, as the devices (and, perhaps, Sigil?) shan't be able to de-encrypt the font to display it. When you open the PDF you made, somewhere along the way, and look at the Font properties, what does it say, please? Does it say, embedded subset, or embedded, or....?

And, while we're at it, do they say "OTF" or "True Type," or...? You're on a Mac, right? Are these fonts from the "font suitcase" you're using?

I mean--here's what may, and I mean, MAY, be part of the issue: fonts used by both Microsoft and Apple are licensed to THEM, not to you. They're licensed to you for personal use. But, when you use the fonts for, say, a print book, you're fine, because you're not redistributing the fonts. IF, however, you try to redistribute the fonts by embedding them IN an ePUB, you have to actually be able to EMBED the font in the ePUB. As far as I know, you cannot secure an entire font file from the Mac "Font Briefcase/Suitcase" (or whatever it's called). You can't, in other words, copy the font file and embed it in the ePUB. So, what I'm trying to grasp is whether, when you used INDD, INDD encrypted the font file so that it couldn't be used (either embedded or decrypted) by Sigil in rendering. I could be completely off-base here--in other words, you may not have "calls" in CSS and the code to an embedded "font," and this mightn't be the problem, BUT, we run into the encrypted font (obscured) issue all the time with PDF's that were created in INDD and sent to us, and then having problems with the client because the "print designer" never understood that the fonts needed for the document couldn't just be "sent" to us from the font suitcase on a Mac.

As I said--I could be completely and utterly off-base here, so...did you embed fonts in INDD; are they OTF or TTF fonts; are they shown in the ePUB (in the code, I mean) as being called through the CSS and "installed" in the CSS, and are they visible in the font folder? Can you download and open the font folder to another computer?

And if I am sending you off on a wild goose chase, my sincere apologies--I'm just spit-balling here, based upon our own experiences with embedded fonts, INDD and the more-often-than-PC-based Mac issues. I could, really, be completely blowing smoke out my keister, too--particularly if you are NOT using any font calls in your document other than the usual type that you'd see in CSS, not using embedded fonts but giving font calls (e.g: "Times New Roman" with a "serif" fallback).

Does any of that help?

Hitch