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Originally Posted by dgatwood
I think what you're seeing is a series a policies that try to throw out font rules that look like they were automatically blown in by Microsoft Word. You probably can't realistically ship an embedded copy of Helvetica or Arial, so listing it by itself in a font declaration doesn't make a lot of sense.
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Well...one CAN. Whether or not this is a smart thing to do, sans licensing, is an entirely different discussion.
I had a prospective client this week, whom I believe just left us to try somewhere else, because she wanted a 10-page sample of her client's book (okay...), which she had produced in PDF from Quark (umhmmm), with more than 40 faces. I think, IIRC, it was 8-10 families, total of just under 40 faces, 3 families being Helvetica Neue 1, 2 and 3, and I actually forget most of the rest. She wanted to know what would happen to all her careful kerning, font manipulation, etc., if we "switched" to open source fonts? I had to tell her that it mattered nary a jot what fonts we used; all the kerning, etc., was gone and soon forgotten, in an eBook. She sent the files in .bins, and I told her that wanting us to make a 10-page sample, from a PDF in the first place (so, don't forget: for us, that's all scan, OCR, proofing, yadda), PLUS add in 40 fonts for testing that, in addition to THAT work, meant I had to individually convert EACH ONE into a TTF...sorry, that's just too much to ask for an unpaid sample. That's crazy talk. I pointed out that it was unlikely that she was going to want to license the likes of HN, anyway, given that it's $70 a face (not family!), per book. She wanted to know WHY she had to license it, when she had "had them for ages."
I 'splained all about font redistribution, etc. I don't think she's emailed back since. Of course, it's likely that she can find someone less...careful about the font licensing, but it will indeed surprise me if she can find someone who can make all 40 of those fonts work in that damned book, who ALSO won't care about the licensing, as there's so few of us around that WILL work with fonts in the first place. (Far easier to tell people that they just won't work, or that Amazon won't "allow" Font X because Company Y owns it).
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Thus, the only way such rules would likely end up in a submission would be if somebody just let Word spew its awful HTML.
Chances are, if you avoid the stock Windows fonts, you'll be fine.
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Y'know, it doesn't really make sense, though. You can't carry fonts in a Word file, not at the KDP. Even if you "embed" them, it doesn't work. So...it's not like just calling Arial in a Word file would do something auto-magical. You'd still have to either embed the font, or call it from the firmware. What IS odd is that even calling Arial, on a Kindle device that HAS it, from the firmware isn't all that reliable, either. Now, THAT is odd. I've also run into span limits with Arial, which I find really interesting. (We've discussed that somewhere else on MR, and I remember not where.)
There's simply a lot that goes on in the PW and pre-PW that we don't know, isn't document, and the Big A isn't telling. To use a modern-day saying, "it is what it is." We fleas that abide on the ass of the elephant simply have to try to NOT steer the elephant. (Although, amazingly: through sheer nagger-y, I HAVE convinced Amazon to do something. More soon on my blog!!)
Hitch