[Psymon]

Originally Posted by Jellby

'm sure there are a few freely embeddable fonts with long-s and ligatures.

I haven't found one -- not free, anyway, and not with all those ligs. If they have the ligs, they're not free, and either way when they have them they're often in a separate "alt" font. And this JSL set is not only free, but it's beautifully designed by an expert type designer who knows what he's doing (which many free font designers don't, and their fonts have horrendous kerning, etc.).

I gotta say, you guys almost had me giving up and resorting to graphics instead! But then I thought about your points, and realized that even your responses (I'm just focussing on yours here, Jellby to reply to) had issues, too.

I think I should point out, first of all, that this ebook of mine is in two parts/halves. The first half is my original text, which was written in plain ol' modern English, and that entire section makes use of nothing funny or unusual in the coding -- I don't even use an embedded font at all (other than for the title page and chapter headings). So that entire first half of my book is perfectly readable, perfectly searchable, and certainly text-to-speech readers would have no problem with it. So there's no issues at all with the first half of my book.

The second half of my book is the exact same text, but transliterated into late-Middle English, and then typeset (so to speak) using the typographic rules of that period (in a period font, of course).

So as far as anyone being able to search my book, it's not like the entire book is "lost" -- the first half (which is exactly the same text, really, as the second half) is perfectly normal English, in a plain ol' standard default font, and perfectly searchable.

As for the second half, well, I don't know too many people that have a clue about late-Middle English spellings -- indeed, many of the words are virtually unrecognizable (for example, "nevertheless" gets transliterated to "natheles"). This has nothing to do with the searchability of the font used -- who would be searching for late-Middle English words and spellings, let alone when typeset by authentic period rules?

And this latter brings up another issue with trying to do what I'm doing. Typesetting in that period goes far beyond the use of ligatures. For example, the use of the letter "u" versus "v" had nothing to do with their sound, but rather their placement within the word (similarly for the long-ess).

- words beginning with "u" or "v" would be typeset starting with "v", eg. "vse", "vp", "vnion", etc.

- "u" was used everywhere else in the word, except the beginning, hence we end up with "vniuerse" (universe), etc.

There's no way that you can typeset that correctly, by the rules of typography of that time -- even if you don't use any ligatures or special characters of any sort -- whereby someone would search for a word by the usual, modern spelling and then find the word.

But then, as I said, the first half of my book is in plain ol' modern English (with the exact same text).

As for some of your other comments...

It depends on what you mean with "can't". It certainly means that it's against the specification, and for a very good reason: the text is garbled without the embedded font. And you just cannot assume that the embedded font will work at all, because:

- A user may disable them.

That's certainly true, but I put a note at the beginning of the text of that second half of my book to the effect that readers should be sure to enable the original publisher's font, otherwise the text may not display correctly.

- A reader may not support them (or the specific format/version you are using).

I know -- that's why I'm only designing this for iBooks (unless I can find a way to do it for other readers). It works perfectly fine -- if not beautifully -- in iBooks.

- A medium may not use fonts at all (think text-to-speech)

I know, but even if I typeset that "olde" half of my book in a regular font, with no funny business (no ligs, etc.), I seriously doubt that a text-to-speech reader would be able to manage with the late-Middle English.

and it would break searching too, I'd have to search "acion" if I want to find "action".

As I said, there's still the first half of my book, in "regular" English.

Actually, I meant that old books used to break words without a hyphen or any other sign.

No they didn't -- and I've been studying the history of print and collecting early printed books for nearly four decades now, and have even had a website on the subject for almost two decades. If ever they broke words at the end of a line and didn't use a hyphen, it was an anomaly, and certainly not standard typography for the time. Trust me on that one.

In any case, for all of the above reasons, no matter how I might try to represent this period text (16th century late-Middle English) so that it displays as it would have in that time, it's not going to be searchable -- and sure, I could do it all up as graphics so that then I could easily make it available on all platforms, no problem, but graphics wouldn't be searchable either!

And like I said, my book is in two parts/halves. The first part is really the "readable" text, in plain English -- no funny font business, and perfectly readable/searchable. The second half is, well, really meant to be typographic "art".

If you still think that I'm going to have issues with trying to publish this book (only on iBooks, unless I can figure out a way to make it work on other platforms), then I'm truly all ears! Seriously, if you guys or anyone else foresees any issues I might have with this -- in light of my explanation(s) above -- then I really do want to hear.

This work is very near and dear to me, and it's very important to me that I get this right, and do this right.