Quote:
Originally Posted by Notjohn
I'm sure you don't want to hear this, but wouldn't the obvious and easy solution be to stop embedding / calling for fonts?
I see embedded fonts and images used as sorts all the time on books from mainstream publishers. They rarely or never add anything of value to the book, and often enough they cause problems. (On that Gemini freebie you mentioned, I see that changes in scene are indicated by three bullets in a row, provided by a small rectangular image. Of course the image shows as white on the beige background of my iPhone--which I use for reading before the opera begins, so I want it muted in appearance as well as in sound--which looks odd a bit ugly.)
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NJ:
His biggest issue is the hyphenation problem, which is utterly unrelated, as near as we can all tell, to embedded fonts. He's used two various fonts for his chapter heads (solely), and the body font is what's hyphenating (peculiarly), which is the issue. As he's not using any font a'tall for the body (unless we count that he's set the body to "serif"), I think we can...
Does anyone know if the 3 other books, in which the bizarro-world hyphenation was noted:
- Have ANY type of embedded font, even just for a fleuron, or,
- Are "calling" one of the device fonts?
- While we're at it, Dreamwriter, have you tried uploading the files sans ANY fonts (chapter or otherwise) or font calls at all? Just letting it default to good ol, good ol Caecilia? Has that experiment been attempted?
BTW, NJ: I don't necessarily agree that embedded fonts add nothing or little at all. While, were I building my own book, I'd probably not include an embedded body font, I think that I'd hold up a lot of the books that we've done, against "Default-plain-jane" any day. Caecilia is a perfectly readable font (Wolfie, if you're reading this, no arguments, please, let's not get off on a tangent), but elegance can be its own reward. Print layout is an ART, not only for the purpose of visual feasting, but for ease on the eyeballs; people rarely realize that the reason that they can read a book with pleasure is because the fonts and pages, etc., are carefully and specially designed
for just that purpose. Anyone who has never worked on real page layout--using textblock proportions--doesn't appreciate just how complex it is to make a page "read easy."
Even something unrelated to the readability of the body--a simple chapter head--can add immeasurably to the flair and essence of a book, and the page that sustains it.
Hitch