[yucca]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

I did not have any luck getting these obscure Greek characters to display on my Nook (embedded font or no). I also heard it had zero luck displaying on the Nook App on Android (I assume because they do not have proper Unicode support?).

I suspect it is a font issue rather than Unicode support problem. The readers probably interpret the character data properly, they just fail to display it. E.g., Adobe Digital Editions (on Win 7) shows the Greek characters in your epub OK, except that they are too slanted, but this is probably a feature of the font it is using. (Greek letters have often been designed in italic style.)

It read perfectly fine on ADE on the PC, Sigil, Mantano Reader (Android)... I assume because these have proper Unicode support.

Reader for PC shows simple Greek letters OK but shows the polytonic letters as question marks. This is typically a font problem, since many fonts lack the polytonic, or “Greek Extended”, characters (as they are mostly used in scholarly works only when presenting classical Greek text).

Hmmm, perhaps someone with a little more embedded font experience might be able to help in my case.

It seems that I have been too optimistic about font embedding. It works fine in web browsers nowadays, and I had tested the technique in Android Reader, too, and was happy about it. But neither Adobe Digital Editions nor Reader for PC seems to support font embedding.

I have attached the EPUB (no embedded font). All Greek words are marked with the CSS class "greek" to allow very easy font tweaking.

Yes, that makes font tweaking very easy (if you want just the Greek words in an embedded font): after other @ rules, you would add e.g.

@font-face {
font-family: FreeSerif;
src: url(/Fonts/FreeSerif.otf;
}

.greek {
font-family: FreeSerif;
}

and you would just need to add the FreeSerif.otf font in the Fonts folder. (I probably would not use FreeSerif, but it was easy to test with it.)

But this does not help much in some important readers, which seem to lack support to font embedding.

(In practice, if the technique worked widely enough, I would probably use a suitable free font for all text, since Greek text should be style-compatible with text in Latin letters. And then I would probably need to embed an italic and a bold and possibly even an italic bold typeface, too, making the file rather large, but probably not excessively large.)

As far as Sigil is considered, things are fine. It lets you add the code for font embedding (though it has no special tools for it, you just write CSS), and it supports font embedding when it shows the book in Book View.