Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Before you dump embedded fonts, you really need to stop and make sure the fonts are not needed. Like sometimes the fonts are embedded so the correct characters are displayed because the default font doesn't do it. Also, sometimes the embedded fonts are used to offset/highlight something and that you lose that if you remove them. There are more reasons for embedded fonts then just to display a certain font.
Sometimes those display issues can be fixed with some simple CSS editing. Calibre's eBook editor will allow you to fix up those eBooks so they will look good on a Kobo Reader. The best way to do it is to have a look at the CSS and XML before another conversion and see how easy it might be to fix things.
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In the particular case I am referring to I had quite a few old books that were lrf and lit format originally.
I did indeed view the CSS and was/am quite comfortable doing that.
Most of these books, if not all, had ordinary line spacing, but all displayed as quadruple LS or worse on the Kobo. Fine on the Sonys or reader apps.
They all had long number of decimal places in the font sizes and I could usually make them work on the kobo by changing all the font sizes from x.xxxxxx to x.x or x.xx.
But many books had a lot of unique font sizes. maybe as many as 40. Changing them could take hours each. Well one hour anyway. Changing all of the font sizes to 1 for example would make them readable but less than nice. Itried editing the html for spacing but that was a nightmare.
Now I know this is bad practice , but these were old books , some I had had for 20 years probably. From PD or cd's etc.
I could have read them on my Sonys, but I had just bought the HD and wanted to use it. I could have redownloaded most of them and got better copies, but there were quite a few.
SO I tried converting to different formats and back and instant success with mobi
The conversion to mobi changed the font sizes to small, large etc. and while not exactly the same, you would have to be very nitpicky to tell the difference as these were older versions without many bells and whistles.
Newer B&N books behaved the same with the quadruple or larger line spacing. Converting to mobi and back to epub worked here as well.
I had been getting advice from the wonderful Kovid Goyal on this issue. Later on he posted advice to others to convert to mobi and back to epub at least 3 times to others.
I mass converted everything lrf, lit and they were all finally fine on the Kobo.
Having started ereading when most books were ugly, even if you paid for them or borrowed from the library and a popular embedded font for PD was a typewriter font I am pretty tolerant, but having an inch of empty screen between each line was way above my tolerance level.
Ideally for spacing, font, font sizes, indents, scene breaks, I want all of my books to be the same on all my readers. Library books I read as is or not read it, but anything I buy I want it consistent. And this worked for me.
Mass convert, a few hours, editing html one by one, Not in my lifetime.
Helen