Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Hard-coded font. Not very user friendly. If you're sufficiently bothered about it you could get rid of it easily enough using Calibre's "Tweak Book" facility.
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I disagree somewhat. I want publishers to to hard code fonts when it makes sense to do so, for example if they want titles in a particular typeface to give it a more distinctive look. Users don't really need to override stuff like that.
I'd also allow for use of embedded fonts for special effects, for example when Harry Potter reads a magic scroll and the typography sets off that text in some distinctive typeface. I don't want that effect lost because I happen to prefer Helvetica for the main body text.
I've also encountered books similar to that referenced in the OT, where some chapters had their typeface hard coded but others did not. The intent was to remind the reader that the chapter represents a specific 'voice' or point of view, while the other chapters represented a variety of views. There are other ways to communicate this sort of thing typographically (use italics, bold, different paragraph styles etc.), and in this case I think it might have worked better had they chosen some other technique (after all the effect is lost if you happen to select the same typeface for the un-hard-coded text), but I think it should be an option.
But I agree that it is not user friendly when the whole book is hard coded and there's no way to override any of it (as in the bad old days of Topaz). It can seriously impact readability of the book for some users.